IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON: 
HIS LIFE \\1) [TS I \ Mol'S S< I A ES 



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Napoleon as Gexeral-ix-Chief of the Army of Italy, by G. Levy 



IN THE 

FOOTSTEPS OF 

NAPOLEON 

HIS LIFE AND 
ITS FAMOUS SCENES 



BY 

JAMES MORGAN 

AUTHOR OF "ABRAHAM LINCOLN. THE 
BOY AND THE MAN." ETC. 



ILLUSTRATED 



IRew HJorfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1915 

All rights reserved 






Copyright. 1914 and 1915 
By JAMES MORGAN 

Copyright, 1915 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Set up and electrotyped. Published, September, 1915 




OCT -7 1915 
©CU410883 



To the 
Dear Memory of a Friend, 

EDWARD FRANCIS BURNS, 
1859-19H, 

who proposed my journey 
in the path of Napoleon 



THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

Before writing this biography of Napoleon, I made a jour- 
ney of nearly twenty thousand miles to the famous scenes in his 
life and along the line of his celebrated marches. The drama 
of history is as much entitled to its proper stage setting as the 
plays of the theatre, and my aim has been to see and portray 
the man in his various backgrounds, to bring closer his habita- 
tions and battlefields, to simplify the geography of his cam- 
paigns. 

It chanced that on the eve of the "War of the Nations, my 
errand took me from Corsica through France and Italy to 
Egypt, the Holy Land, and Syria ; over the Alps and through 
Austria, Germany, and Poland into Russia, and finally to 
Elba and Waterloo. The Russians and Germans had only 
lately commemorated their liberation from Napoleon's empire, 
and the British and other peoples were preparing to celebrate 
the centennial of his final overthrow at Waterloo, when an- 
other great European war suddenly burst upon the same fields 
where the same powers had struggled for mastery 100 years 
before. 

The War of the Nations is the tragic sequel of the Na- 
poleonic wars. Some of the parties may have changed sides 
for the moment; but in their motives and their strategy, the 
two wars are strangely alike, and I have depicted the earlier 
as the forerunner of this later conflict. 

The centenary of Napoleon's downfall, moreover, seems to 
offer an appropriate occasion for telling again the story that 
never grows old, and for telling it in the light of our own 
times. An effort has been made, therefore, to find in his rise 
and fall something more than the miraculous vicissitudes of 
a legendary superman, or the meaningless sport of blind for- 
tune. I have tried to present him simply as a man of the 



THE AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

people who, in a period of chaos, was called out of the crowd 
to embody and vindicate the race of common men against the 
privileged few, to sweep away ancient systems and wrongs, 
and, as the incarnation of the Great Revolution, to be en- 
throned above monarchs of long descent. In short, I have 
represented him as the servant of a mighty power not of him- 
self 

that o'er him planned 

and which, with the pitilessness of nature, cast him away 
when, blinded by personal ambition, he was no longer faithful 
and useful to its purpose. This is the Napoleon who, after 
the lapse of a century, retains his dominion over the imagina- 
tion of the world, supreme in the admiration and the disap- 
pointment, in the applause and reproach of men. 



Since my wife shared my travels and my labours in the 
preparation of this volume, I hope I may be permitted grate- 
fully to acknowledge her joint authorship. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I Birth and Birthplace 3 

II Schooldays in France 13 

III Before the Dawn 22 

IV The Man on Horseback 31 

V A Love Story 38 

VI The Little Corporal 46 

VII In the Cockpit of Europe 52 

VIII Conquering Austria 60 

IX Nations at the Feet of a Youth 65 

X The Descent upon Egypt 73 

XI The Battle of the Pyramids 82 

XII Into the Holy Land 91 

XIII His First Retreat 100 

XIV Ruler of France 110 

XV Crossing the Alps 118 

XVI Marengo Lost and Won 127 

XVII The Law Giver 135 

XVIII Selling Louisiana 143 

XIX A Day at Malmaison 147 

XX How the Republic Died 159 

XXI Twice Crowned 167 

XXII The Unconquered Sea 178 

XXIII The Fall of Vienna 184 

XXIV The Sun of Austerlitz 193 

XXV The Matchmaker 206 

XXVI The Kingmaker 213 

XXVII Crushing Prussia 218 

XXVIII Eylau and Friedland 226 

XXIX At Tilsit 238 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XXX Napoleon's Marshals 247 

XXXI Victories of Peace 252 

XXXII Fortune Turns 264 

XXXIII His Last Victory 272 

XXXIV The Unconquered Sex 282 

XXXV The Divorce 292 

XXXVI The Second Marriage 301 

XXXVII The King of Rome 310 

XXXVIII A World at War 320 

XXXIX On to Moscow 329 

XL The Torch That Fired the World .... 339 

XLI The Great Tragedy 350 

XLII The Rising of the Peoples 361 

XLIII The Battle of the Nations 369 

XLIV At Bay 382 

XLV The First Abdication 392 

XLVI Emperor of Elba 402 

XLVII The Return from Elba 413 

XLVIII The Hundred Days 425 

XLIX Waterloo 433 

L The Captive Eagle 448 

LI St. Helena 458 

LII L'AlGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 473 

LIII Across a Century 485 

Chronology of Napoleon's Life 495 

Index 505 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Napoleon, as General-in-Chief of the Army of Italy, by G. 

L eV y , Frontispiece 



FACING 
PAGE 



Napoleon's Mother and his Birthplace 6 

Statue of Napoleon, the Schoolboy, and the Gate of his old 

School at Brienne le Chateau I 6 

An Early Portrait of Napoleon, by Bailly 34 

Josephine, by Prud'hon 40 

The Little Corporal at the Bridge of Lodi, and With Josephine 

at a Fete in Milan 62 

At the Fete of Mahomet in Cairo 84 

In the Saddle, by Bellange 114 

Welcomed by the Monks of St. Bernard 120 

Napoleon with his nephews and nieces, by Ducis 144 

Napoleon Crowning Josephine, by David 170 

The Emperor in the Midst of his New Aristocracy . . . .130 

At Austerlitz, by Gerard I 98 

The Emperor and Empress at the Marriage of Jerome Bona- 
parte to the Princess Catherine, by Regnault 208 

Princes of the New Imperial Family 214 

The Conqueror, by Meissonier, with his Hat and his Camp 

Washstand 22 ° 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING 
PAGE 



The Emperor of the West and the Emperor of the East Meet- 
ing on the Raft at Tilsit, and Napoleon Greeting Queen 
Louise of Prussia 240 

Some Portraits of the Emperor 254 

Some Napoleonic Autographs 258 

Women of the Imperial Family 286 

The Divorce of Josephine, by Sartain 296 

Marie Louise and the King of Rome, by Gerard 304 

Napoleon and his Son, by Steuben 314 

"Bad News from France," by Verestchagin 342 

In Retreat 364 

The Adieu to the Guard at Fontainebleau 396 

The Fallen Monarch, and his Elban Retreat 406 

Waterloo, by Steuben 440 

On the Bellerophon, by Orchardson 452 

Longwood, and the Nameless Grave at St. Helena .... 462 

The Last Days of Napoleon, by Vela, and the Camp Bed on 

which he died 468 

Two Portraits of Napoleon at St. Helena 478 

The Hotel des Invalides at Paris, and the Tomb of Napoleon . 488 



IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON: 
HIS LIFE AND ITS FAMOUS SCENES 



IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF 
NAPOLEON 



CHAPTER I 
BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 

BORN AUGUST 15, 1769 

THE strange, eventful history of Napoleon, the strangest 
and most eventful in human story, must forever start 
at Ajaceio, the quaint, out-of -the- world capital of 
Corsica. 

Sailing out of the Mediterranean into the Bay of Ajaceio, 
between Capo di Muro and the blood red lies Sanguinaires, 
the eye of a traveller is enchanted by a scene of beauty prob- 
ably unsurpassed in all those waters except by the larger and 
grander Bay of Naples. Behind its hoary grey citadel, the 
town glistens like a white city where the green slopes of snow- 
capped Monte d'Oro come down from the blue sky to meet the 
blue sea. 

The fast little steamer, which makes the 210 mile voyage 
from Marseilles in about 12 hours and the 150 mile journey 
from Nice in nine, ties up side-on to a stone dock, where the 
passengers step ashore as from a train at a railway station and 
are at once in "la cite Napoleonienne, ' ' with mementoes of 
the immortal Ajaccian on every side. 

Tall palms at the end of the quay surround a wide, shady 
square which opens the way up town. At the top of this 
short Place des Palmiers a street leads into the older town 
back of the citadel. It is the Rue Napoleon. Three streets 
on the right from this is the narrow, almost sunless Rue St. 

3 



4 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Charles, and there at the end of the first block stands a four 
story, square stone house at the corner of a still narrower 
street. Above the door there is a marble tablet with this in- 
scription in French: 

Napoleon 

was born in this house 

August 15, 1769 

On that August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption, ever the 
greatest day in the religious calendar for the Corsicans, was 
being celebrated in Ajaccio. The little town had given itself 
over to the holiday and the country people had been swarming 
in afoot and on mule back since early morning. The bells were 
ringing, the houses were green with boughs and the cathedral 
altar was abloom with wild flowers from the mountain side. 

In the middle of the forenoon the beautiful young Signora 
Bonaparte — a girl of nineteen — leading by the hand her six- 
year-old half-brother, Joseph Fesch, and followed by her hus- 
band's uncle, Luciano, and her husband's sister-in-law, Gel- 
truda Paravacini, came out of that front door over which the 
tablet now rests and made her way down the street two blocks 
to the cathedral. While she was among the kneeling wor- 
shippers at the mass, she received the painful warnings of 
maternity. Calling for the aid of her companion, she was 
assisted to her feet and led out of the crowded church to her 
home. There she sank upon a sofa and, at eleven o'clock in 
the morning, Napoleon entered the world. 

No physician had been summoned. No midwife was in at- 
tendance, and that office was fulfilled by Signora Paravacini, 
aided by the maid of all work, Mammucia Caterina, for his- 
tory has treasured all this time every name connected with the 
opening scene in the great drama. 

There was, moreover, a stirring prologue to this drama some 
fifty miles away in the wild heart of the then half-barbarous 
island, and the savage Corsican mountains are the first back- 
ground in the life of Napoleon. His prenatal environment 
appropriately was a scene of war, crowded with moving acci- 
dents by flood and field. For forty years a primitive and 



BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 5 

liberty loving people, only 160,000 in all, Italian in speech and 
by tradition but Corsicans at heart, had been struggling for 
their independence, first against the rich republic of Genoa and 
at last against the great kingdom of France, to which the 
Genoese had pawned the sovereignty of Corsica, with its less 
than 4000 square miles of wild mountains and fruitful valleys. 

Ajaccio being a seaport, the French invader had readily 
captured it, and the patriotic Bonapartes, men and women 
together, fled the town to join the patriot army, where Signora 
Bonaparte's husband was the secretary of Paoli, the Corsican 
general-in-chief. A year and a half before the date on the 
tablet the signora had taken refuge in an old house in the little 
mountain town of Corte, then the capital, where she gave birth 
to a son. The house stands to this day, and inscribed amid the 
many battle scars on its walls is the announcement that it is 
the birthplace of King Joseph Bonaparte of Spain. 

The next year, when the despairing band of Corsicans was 
making its last stand before the guns of Louis XV, the brave 
young mother was the companion of her husband in the field. 
Holding her baby boy, Joseph, in one arm, she drove her 
saddle mule with her free hand, while, as she said, "under 
my heart I carried my Napoleon, with the same calm pleasure 
that I felt afterward when I held him in my arms and fed him 
at my breast. ... I heard the balls whistling round my ears, 
without a shadow of fear, as I trusted to the protection of the 
Holy Virgin." 

Often the expectant mother slept in the open in the midst of 
the soldiers. On the long, swift marches up and down and 
around the rugged mountains she rode beside or behind her 
husband and sometimes was obliged to trudge afoot with the 
hunted army, pursued everywhere by overwhelming forces. 
In next the last battle she was present on the field, and after 
the final crushing defeat was among those who fled from the 
conquering French and hid in the fugitives' grotto, which is 
still shown in a wilderness of granite far up the side of Monte 
Rotondo. 

Some three hundred Corsicans, who were determined never 
to wear the yoke of the French, gathered around their General- 



6 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

in-chief and sailed away on an exile to England. Signora 
Bonaparte 's husband was eager to go with them. But "for the 
objections of the wife, who was to be a mother again in three 
months, London and not Ajaccio would have been the birth- 
place of Napoleon and he would have become perhaps a British 
soldier. Yielding to her counsels, the husband decided to re- 
main in the island and he took the lead in making peace with 
the French commander. 

The subjugation of Corsica was complete — and France had 
annexed Napoleon Bonaparte ! 

A bride before she was fourteen, Letizia was nineteen at the 
birth of Napoleon, who was her fourth child. The first two 
having failed to lay hold on life, and remembering that sad 
experience and her recent struggles and privations with the 
army in the field, there was a natural anxiety about the new- 
comer. She nursed him while she could and then her place 
was taken by a sailor's wife, Camilla Ilari, another name im- 
mortalised by association with this infant, her ' ' Nabulionello, " 
as the good woman fondly called her charge. 

In a land of lovely women, Letizia had worn from girlhood 
the challenging title of the "most beautiful woman in Cor- 
sica." According to the standards of a race of low stature, 
she was of medium height and of graceful carriage, with the 
small hands and feet and ears, the regular teeth, the chestnut 
hair, the noble forehead, the brilliant eyes, the long, well- 
formed nose, the fine mouth and strong chin which Napoleon 
was to inherit as he developed into manhood. It is certain, 
however, that he was not hailed as a pretty baby or one worthy 
of a beautiful mother and a handsome father, and for a long 
time the family was troubled because his big head was so out of 
proportion to his really frail body. 

Napoleon, as well as his mother, testified that he was a wild, 
unruly boy, whose inseparable companion was no other than 
his foster brother, his ' ' brother of the milk, ' ' Ignazio Ilari, the 
son of a sailor and a nurse. Long years afterward, when he 
sat down on another island to gaze across the gulf of a life- 
time, and this island of Corsica swam into view, he said of his 
childhood : 



BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 7 

"I was self-willed and obstinate; nothing awed me; nothing 
disconcerted me. I was quarrelsome, exasperating; I feared 
no one. I gave a blow here and a scratch there. Every one 
was afraid of me. My brother, Joseph, was the one with whom 
I had the most to do; he was beaten, bitten, scolded. I had 
put the blame on him almost before he knew what he was 
about, was telling tales about him almost before he could col- 
lect his wits. I had to be quick. My mamma, Letizia, would 
have restrained my warlike temper; she would not have put 
up with my defiant petulance. Her tenderness was severe, 
meting out punishment and reward with equal justice ; merit 
and demerit, she took both into account." 

The rod was not spared by the stern and exacting mother. 
A cuff or two on the ear were sometimes required to get the 
boy started to church even on Sunday. When he persisted 
one day in following his mother against her orders, she turned 
and calmly gave him such a vigorous slap that he rolled down 
a hill, where she left him to pick himself up while she went 
on her way without looking back. Even when the time came 
for him to flatter himself that he was "too big to be whipped," 
he learned his mistake. Because his old grandmother walked 
with a cane he called her a witch in spite of all her pampering 
of him. The mother simply waited until he was changing his 
clothes for dinner, in expectation of guests, and catching him 
out of his armour, gave him one more and his last parental 
chastisement. 

To an American seeking dramatic effects in the plebeian 
origin of the Emperor, his birthplace is a disappointment. It 
is too large and too nearly palatial for the purpose of contrast. 
While Napoleon was a parvenu among kings, he was an aristo- 
crat among Corsicans and belonged to one of the first families 
of Ajaccio. His father was "the noble Signor Carlo di Buona- 
parte" in the record of his marriage, and by the same evidence 
his mother the daughter of "the noble Signor Jean Jerome 
Ramolino. ' ' 

The old family mansion at Ajaccio has hardly been occupied 
since the Bonapartes were banished from Corsica — to fame and 
fortune. Napoleon's mother willed it to the King of Rome, 



8 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

but she outlived the King, and at her death it came into the 
possession of King Joseph Bonaparte. Now it is the property 
of the ex-Empress Eugenie. Across the street, is the tiny 
Place Letizia, where once stood the girlhood home of the 
mother, the site of which Eugenie has bought and sown with 
flower seed. 

On the second floor of the Bonaparte home, joining the salon 
de visite where the inevitable register now awaits the tourist's 
autograph, is a large chamber with one window overlooking 
the side street. This is the veritable shrine of the temple — 
the room in which Napoleon was born. The low, narrow sofa 
on which the young mother lay in the clothes she had worn at 
church still stands against the wall. 

There is little in the birthroom now except memories, but 
they crowd it. A Bible scene is there, carved in wood, a gift 
that Napoleon brought his mother when he came home for the 
last time after his Egyptian campaign. A bust of Eugenie's 
Prince Imperial is on the mantel where she placed it with her 
own hands when she was Empress of the French. 

On the wall above the sofa is a simple engraving in a cheap 
frame. It is a picture of the child grown to young manhood 
but still looking very boyish, the "Little Corporal" waving 
the tricolour flag of France on the bridge of Arcole. It is like 
a picture of him at play and in keeping with the scenes of his 
j^outh, where on the red tiled floor he stamped about, a wooden 
sword on his thigh. 

The house as a whole is now scantily furnished, but the birth 
chamber and its sofa, the veritable nest in which the eagle was 
hatched, is enough for the most eager pilgrim, and this, with 
the house itself, should appease the greediest curiosity. Then 
there is Napoleon's back bedroom, where the boy's wild dreams 
did not equal the realities of the life ahead of him. Moreover, 
this room has a trap door, and the trap door has a legend of 
young Napoleon dropping through it to escape from pursuing 
enemies in the Revolution. 

If the largeness of the exterior takes the visitor by surprise, 
he will be astonished by the imposing interiors of the house, 
the drawing room, the dining room, the smoking room, and the 



BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 9 

cabinet or study of the father, all with their mantels of Car- 
rara marble. The grand drawing room, the salon des fetes, its 
floor of shining parquetry ready for a ball and its walls hung 
with mirrors and candelabra, suggests the labours of a restorer, 
for when Napoleon early in. his fortunes ordered the old home 
repaired, Joseph, to whom the duty was intrusted, is said to 
have touched up and embellished the ancestral background of 
the newly arisen family. 

However that may be, a sympathetic observer, with a mind 
for practical things, cannot but be sorry as he wanders from 
room to room, each opening from the other, to think of poor 
Letizia taking care of this big house and her eight children 
with only one servant to help her ! 

Among the rare keepsakes of the birthplace is the book of 
ritual which the priest, who was a Corsican, employed when 
he prepared Napoleon for death at St. Helena. Perhaps the 
richest treasure of all, which is kept in the house of the cus- 
todian, is a laurel wreath or crown of gold, costing $7000, 
which some enthusiasts ordered for the centenary of the Con- 
sulate when it was celebrated in 1902. 

Everywhere Ajaccio echoes the memories of her greatest son. 
The very dock at which the steamer lands is the Quay Na- 
poleon, and bending down to the shore from a terraced height 
runs the Boulevard du Roi Jerome, recalling the youngest 
brother of Napoleon. Farther up the leafy Place of Palms, 
where the flowing water ripples in a fountain, rises a white 
marble statue of the First Consul, sheeted like a Roman and 
with a rudder in his right hand. Although he followed his 
star by land and not by water, the Ajaccian naturally thinks 
of his immortal fellow islander as at the helm. 

Behind the back of that marble effigy, the shady square 
comes to an end. Or rather it merely narrows into the still 
spacious Avenue du Premier Consul, lined by more palms, and 
continues straight on for two blocks where it is intersected by 
the Rue Bonaparte and by the most important street in town, 
the Cours Napoleon, along which the throngs saunter beneath 
the wide-spreading orange trees. 

From the Rue Bonaparte, the Rue du Roi de Rome winds its 



10 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

way to the old cathedral, built before 1600, and where Na- 
poleon's parents were married with all possible pomp. At the 
right of the door stands the baptismal font, surmounted now 
by an elaborately carved bronze canopy with a crown at the 
top. Under the crown, ' ' The glory of God and the glory of the 
world" is engraved with the names of the Bonaparte princes 
and princesses who were baptised by the priests of the cathe- 
dral. But the most conspicuous object is a red marble tablet 
on a pillar whereon in letters of gold are these words at- 
tributed to Napoleon's will : 

If my corpse should be proscribed in Paris as I have been, I wish 
to be buried among my ancestors in the cathedral of Ajaccio in Cor- 
sica. 

This modest plain old village church well may boast, there- 
fore, that it stood only second to the magnificent Hotel des 
Invalides in the choice of the imperial exile. How nearly it 
came to being both the burial place and the birthplace of 
Napoleon ! 

If Ajaccio, however, is not the sepulchre of the Maker of 
Kings, it guards the dust of the Mother of Kings. In the 
courtyard of the College Fesch in the Rue Fesch — named for 
the young uncle who taught Napoleon his a, b, c's and who was 
rewarded with the red hat of a cardinal — is the Chapel Im- 
perial, which, although erected only in 1860, looks as venerable 
as the ancient mausoleum of the Bourbons at St. Denis. Com- 
ing out of the glare of the street into the dusk of the chapel, 
the visitor sees at first no other epitaph than that of "Mater 
Regum," but drawing nearer the engraved roll of Letizia's 
princely offspring becomes legible. Her silent companions in 
the chapel are her half brother, Cardinal Fesch, and two 
princes and a princess among the lesser known of the Bona- 
partes. 

When Letizia's remains were enthroned there, having first 
been brought from Rome and placed in a chapel of the cathe- 
dral, the star of the Bonapartes was risen again and was 
shining gloriously on the Second Empire. But to-day Ajaccio, 



BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 11 

alone in a faithless world, remains faithful to the memory 
of the vanished empire and its dynasty. 

Some lightning- impressionist has described the town as ' ' the 
shade of Napoleon, with houses built around it. " It is a com- 
munity of idol worshippers ; it is all a big Napoleonic museum, 
where every trinket of the Bonapartes is sacredly cherished. 

There is only one Napoleonic object in town which the 
Ajaccians do not take seriously. This is the group of statuary 
in the Place du Diamant, at the edge of the sea, where Na- 
poleon in Roman toggery sits in bronze on a horse poised atop 
a block of granite, with his four brothers afoot at the corners. 
Even the idolatrous smile at the stiff group, which is derisively 
called "the inkstand." 

More interesting is the big, wide square itself, for it was the 
playground of Napoleon and his first battlefield; Whether it 
was all Austerlitz and no Waterloo for him in those youthful 
engagements we are left to wonder. Ajaccio then was a little 
walled town, with a gate and bastion. Between the wall and 
the citadel at the point of the peninsula the 3500 inhabitants 
were packed in eighteen or twenty streets. The nobles and 
merchants, and their retainers, lived in the old houses within 
the wall, while the sailors, mechanics and laborers dwelt in the 
hardscrabble village outside. 

Between the boys of those two communities there was a ven- 
detta bequeathed from generation to generation of boyhood, 
and Napoleon first got into action as the champion of his side 
in this inherited quarrel, marshalling his troops, armed with 
sticks and stones, to drive the invaders out of the town gate 
and to meet hostile reinforcements under the wall. The boy 
sprang from a fighting race and was bred to war in an age of 
strife. His earliest lesson in history was of the Forty Years' 
War, which ended at his birth. "I was born," he once said, 
"when my native land died." As the stirring story of the 
long and unequal struggle of his people dawned upon his 
understanding, he adopted Paoli as his model and his little 
breast was filled with patriotic zeal. 

Friends of the family, seeing him eating soldiers' bread in 



12 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

the streets, were shocked by his presenting a spectacle so un- 
becoming his parentage and reported it to his mother, who 
found it was a habit of the boy to swap his home-made bread 
for the coarser kind issued to the garrison. "lama soldier, ' ' 
he insisted, ' ' and I intend to eat what the soldiers eat. ' ' 



CHAPTER II 
SCHOOLDAYS IN FRANCE 

1778-1785 AGE 9-16 

A FORLORN, sallow-faced boy, not yet ten years old and 
small for his age, alien-looking and speaking broken 
French, climbed down from a two wheeled cart and 
followed a priest through the gate of the school kept by the 
Minim friars at Brienne le Chateau in France one day in May 
in the year 1779. There he was registered as Napoleone de 
Buonaparte, although he called himself after his native Cor- 
sican fashion, Nabulione Buonaparte — ' ' Nah-bool-ee-ony Bona- 
party." 

Among the few more than 100 pupils in the school, all of 
noble birth, there were sixty poor boys of the nobility who were 
educated on the bounty of the King, now Louis XVI. Thanks 
to the efforts of Napoleon's father as a seeker of government 
favours and his mother's hospitality to the French conqueror of 
Corsica, he was admitted to this group. Carlo Bonaparte had 
submitted proof of eleven generations of noble Bonapartes be- 
hind his son and filed a "certificate of indigence," in which 
four Corsicans declared that he was too poor to educate Na- 
poleon in accordance with his birth. 

Carlo's memorandum when he went home, after placing 
Napoleon in school, was characteristic: ... "I started for 
the court of France, deputy noble of the estates of Corsica, 
taking with me 100 louis. I received while in Paris 4000 
francs in gratifications from the King, and 1000 ecus in fees ; 
and I returned without a sou." He had, however, brought 
back from Paris twelve beautiful suits of silk and velvet for 
himself. 

As fast as the younger children grew up they were regularly 

13 



14 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

and promptly transferred by Carlo to the care and keep of a 
generous government, while he himself was on the payroll as 
assessor of the royal court of justice in Ajaccio and drew his 
emoluments as the deputy of the Corsican nobility in Paris. 

A lawyer by profession, he seems to have had hardly any 
other client than himself. While a talented man and industri- 
ous enough, he laboured hard and constantly all his days to 
support himself and family by some more respectable means 
than earning his living. 

With his father away much of the time and his mother 
ignorant of books, Napoleon received no education at home. 
From his uncle, Joseph Fesch, he learned the alphabet and he 
was taught the catechism by his great-uncle, Luciano Bona- 
parte, the archdeacon. At six he was sent to a girls' school 
to receive lessons from nuns and next he passed to a brothers' 
school, Abbe Recco's, where he gave the first sign of his apti- 
tude for mathematics. 

The boy was only nine when he bade good-bye to his home 
to enter upon a six years' school course among strangers in 
a strange land, never again to know throughout the tender 
years of youth the loving care of a mother or the affections 
and comforts of a family circle. Sailing away from Ajaccio 
on a winter's day, with his father and Joseph and his uncle 
Fesch, he first set foot on the soil of France at Marseilles. 

For three months he stayed with Joseph at Autun, in order 
that he might be instructed a little in the French language, as 
he still spoke only the Italian dialect of Corsica. When the 
time came for him to leave for Brienne the elder brother wept 
loudly at the parting, but only one tear escaped Napoleon's 
self-repression, and that evidence of weakness was quickly 
brushed away. Joseph might cry ; he was going to be a priest, 
but a soldier must have a stout heart. 

The boy would need at Brienne all the stoicism in his nature. 
The discipline there was prescribed by the war department as 
suited to the breeding of soldiers. In some respects it would 
have been equally suitable for a prison and it would be looked 
upon to-day as a cruelly severe regime to impose upon a boy 
as young as Napoleon. 



SCHOOLDAYS IN FRANCE 15 

He Wore a bine uniform with red facings and white metal 
buttons on his coat, and he had to do his own mending. His 
hair was cut short until he had reached the age of twelve, 
after which he was privileged to sport a pigtail, but it must 
not be powdered except on Sundays and saints' days. He 
slept by himself in a six-foot cell, but ate with the other boys 
in the mess hall and knelt with them in the chapel at morning 
mass and evening prayer. 

He had no vacations nor hardly an opportunity to see the in- 
side of a home. He saw his mother only once, when, yearning 
to look upon her boys, she persuaded herself to leave her family 
cares and join her husband on a journey to France, where she 
was shocked to find Napoleon so thin and worn. 

The little Corsican had found himself a mark for the boys 
of Autun at the outset of his life in France and never was 
permitted to forget that he was an alien. He was greeted 
with the same mischievous hostility in Brienne and had to 
contend with bitter disadvantages. 

His appearance and his foreign accent moved his young 
comrades to laughter. His Corsican nobility was not taken 
any more seriously by these children of the old nobles of 
France than if he claimed descent from some tribal chief 
among the American Indians. Corsica to their understanding 
was a savage country and they knew of it only as a scene of 
rebellions and vendettas, regarding it perhaps as our world 
to-day regards Albania in the scale of civilisation. 

The paying pupils made him feel his poverty. With the 
thoughtless and unsparing cruelty of boyhood, they chose the 
friendless, unsocial stranger as a target for all manner of 
taunts which drove the moody boy in upon his moods and 
sometimes threw him into fits of ungovernable rage. For a 
time he led a gloomy, solitary existence on the prairie of 
northeastern France, far from his kindred and in what seemed 
to him by comparison with his sunny island a bleak and wintry 
land. 

He did not get along much better with the friars than with 
the boys when he first went to Brienne. He was not unruly, 
but his air of sullen defiance and his aloofness troubled the 



16 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

priests. "While corporal punishment had been forbidden by 
the government, he seems to have received at least one flog- 
ging. Again, for some infraction of a rule, he was ordered to 
do penance before all the boys by eating a meal on his knees 
at the door of the refectory. He protested vehemently that 
his mother had told him to kneel only to God, and that he 
would kneel to no man. His indignation finally running into 
a wild tantrum he had to be carried off to bed. 

Plainly the King of France was nurturing a very rebellious 
subject. One of the friars reminded him of the debt of grati- 
tude he owed the King, but the boy was steadily forming the 
purpose to employ the education the nation was giving him as 
a means of promoting the liberty of Corsica rather than the 
glory of France. "I will do these French all the mischief I 
can, ' ' he muttered, according to the report of one of his class- 
mates. A priest reproving him at confession for his denuncia- 
tion of France, he ran out of the confessional, shouting : "I 
do not come to this place to talk about Corsica, and a priest has 
no mission to lecture me on that subject." 

Probably with the idea of bringing him into line, the friars 
gave him a post of honour in the corps, but the boys court- 
martialed him as "unworthy of our esteem since he disdains 
our affections." His independence, however, was piquing 
them at last, and this, with his uncomplaining acceptance 
of their verdict, served to bring him more into their favour. 
At any rate, he found himself after a while on better terms 
with his surroundings, and with one of the boys, Louise 
Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, he formed a close friend- 
ship. 

In Napoleon's last winter at Brienne, there was a heavy 
snow, which brought him an opportunity, the only recorded 
one, to be a leader among his school fellows. The snow was 
so deep in the big courtyard that the boys were snowbound. 
Napoleon proposed that they get shovels, build snow forts, and 
dividing up, engage in sieges and attacks. "I," said the 
strategist, ' ' I will direct the movements. ' ' The boys took hold 
with enthusiasm, the forts were erected and were furiously 
stormed until the contending forces had delved so deep that 



SCHOOLDAYS IN FRANCE 17 

gravel was mixed with the snowballs and the casualties grew 
serious. 

The school as a school seems to have been rather poor. It 
failed utterly to discover Napoleon, and there is no record 
that this world-beater won a single prize at Brienne. He re- 
ceived dancing lessons, but did not learn to dance. He took 
German, but seems not to have remembered any of it in man- 
hood. He read Latin authors with a real hunger for knowl- 
edge, but never got beyond the fourth class in his Latin studies. 
He received writing lessons, but his penmanship is perhaps 
the worst in history. 

The library was his favourite haunt. In the recreation 
periods he was more likely to be there with a volume of Plu- 
tarch in his hand than on the playground. He had found for 
himself the combination of the lock on the storehouse of knowl- 
edge — a desire to read books, the habit of reading them and a 
capacity to understand them. 

He had been at Brienne more than five years and was a few 
months past his fifteenth birthday when he was promoted to 
the Ecole Militaire at Paris. Probably the only person in 
town who marked his departure, the only soul who cared 
whether he stayed or went was Bourrienne, who rode with his 
friend as far as the stage line for Paris. 

The charmingly simple village of Brienne to which Napoleon 
came again after twenty years and still again after ten more, 
lies in the bosom of France some one hundred and twenty-five 
miles to the east of Paris and near Troyes, the ancient capital 
of Champagne. It is to-day only a dot on a gentle rolling, 
well wooded plain, where the red roofs that shelter its 1800 
inhabitants cluster about two cross roads. 

Those are really the only streets, with a few little lanes 
straying off from them into the pretty countryside, while 
crowning, dominating all is the chateau. This is not, how- 
ever, one of the old French chateaux; it was new when Na- 
poleon went there to school, but on its hill the counts of 
Brienne have had their seat for 900 years. At the cross- 
roads in the centre and almost in the shadow of the great man- 
sion of the count, is this street sign : 



18 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 



BRIENNE LE CHATEAU. 



Beneath the newer lettering is barely discernible an older 
sign: 



BRIENNE LE NAPOLEON. 



The fickleness of fame ! Brienne had been proud one day 
to link her name with that of the little Corsican she once 
despised, after which there came another day when she painted 
out his name as if it never had been. But there it still is, 
shining through the unavailing effort to eclipse it. 

Beyond a block of idle village shops on the other main street 
is the sightly Hotel de Ville. There stands in bronze the 
immortal schoolboy of Brienne, with golden eagles and a 
crown at his feet, but yet only a long-haired, lean and hungry 
boy. Behind the statue is the door of the Hotel de Ville and 
over it in marble the head of Napoleon the man, with fame 
and victory crowning him. 

A little farther on in this street rises an old wall and here 
behind this wall stood the school of the Minim friars, the first 
perch of the eagle in his flight from the mother nest at Ajac- 
cio. The school is no more; it was closed by the Revolu- 
tion in 1793, when there was no longer a king of France to 
pay for the education of the sons of poor noblemen and when 
noblemen and friars alike were banished from the coun- 
try. 

The one survivor, the one spared monument of the school, 
is the convent in which the friars lived. It still stands under 
the shade of a noble tree and there the soldiers of the Republic, 
a little garrison of sixty men, have their barracks, its name 
printed on the gable end of the old convent, "Caserne Bona- 
parte, 1896." 

The memory of the boy who went to school there is more 
graphically preserved by a weatherstained marble statue of 



SCHOOLDAYS IN FRANCE 19 

him above the gate, with the inscription, "Napoleon 1779- 
1784." The statue stands on an arch beneath which the sol- 
diers come and go on their dull routine, and on which is in- 
scribed "Ancienne Ecole Militaire, 1776-1793," while one 
of the stone gate posts bears the roll of the more famous 
schoolboys of Brienne: Bonaparte, Bourrienne, Pichegru, 
Davout, Nansouty, D'Haupoul, Gudin, Sorbier, Marescot' 
La Bretcheche, Bruneteau, Vallee. 

Back at the crossroads stands the old church, bare and still 
within, where the family of the count worship on red cush- 
ioned pews in a special reservation. On a level with its belfry 
where now hang three bells— not, however, the ones which 
long resounded in the ear of Napoleon— sits the chateau which 
once no doubt seemed to frown down upon the little Corsican, 
but where the Beauffremonts, proud of their long descent, were 
made prouder still when they welcomed him back to Brienne 
in 1805, for then he wore the crown of France and was pausing 
there in his imperial progress to his second coronation at 
Milan. 

He came back to Brienne once more in 1814, and there 
again he led the French in battle— but this time not with 
snowballs. He was fighting now to save his two crowns, and 
like a wounded eagle fluttering to its nest, he ran into the vil- 
lage with all Europe in pursuit of him. He found no wel- 
come at the chateau, for Blucher held it, but he took it by 
storm and slept once more in the castle whose showroom to 
this day is the "chambre a coucher de Napoleon," with every- 
thing in it carefully kept, just as he left it January 31, 1814. 

It was as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy from the village of 
Brienne, following at the heels of a Minim friar, that Na- 
poleon, in the month of October, 1784, made his first entry 
into the capital of France where he was delivered to the 
authorities of the Ecole Militaire. The old building, which 
is still standing and belongs to the army, is not far from the 
Eiffel Tower— and the Hotel des Invalides. 

There Napoleon was entered as a gentleman cadet and 
there he was confronted with a still prouder aristocracy, for 
the first families did not send their sons to Brienne. 



20 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The French military training as a whole was now the envy 
of other nations and attracted many foreign pupils. While 
Napoleon was at the Paris Ecole, there was in another French 
school at Angiers an Irish boy, Arthur Wellesley by name, 
but better known to history as the Duke of Wellington. 

In the first months of Napoleon's stay at the Ecole his 
father was in France once more, but this time for his health. 
He came to see a Paris physician regarding a severe stomach 
trouble which had been afflicting him for some time and it 
was found that he had cancer. Leaving Paris, he was at 
Montpellier, in southern France, when his disease overcame 
him, and there he died, in the thirty-ninth year of his life. 

Carlo's days, though few, were yet crowned with a success 
which he coveted above any gains for himself; an opportunity 
for his children to take the position in the world to which he 
thought their birth entitled them. 

Like most men of great force, Napoleon was the son of a 
weak father and a strong mother. Yet there was something 
truly Napoleonic in Carlo Bonaparte's bold assurance and 
restless ambition, and this may have been his legacy to Na- 
poleon. As a whole his character was a vain and futile one, 
but his very weakness fitted him to play a certain useful part 
in the drama of his son's life. 

At the Ecole, Napoleon had a roommate, Des Mazis, who 
became his bosom friend and his only real friend in all Paris. 
There, too, he made an enemy who was destined to cross his 
path in after years. This was a boy named Phelippeaux. 
Picot de Peccadeuc sat between the two boys for a time, but 
when his shins were black and blue from their wild kicks at 
each other he asked to be moved from the firing line. 

The most important thing that happened to Napoleon while 
at the Ecole was a new course of reading he took up soon 
after entering the place. Paris was then sitting on the vol- 
cano of the Revolution, and the boy's mind passed under the 
influence of the revolutionary philosophy which was swaying 
the thought of the capital. 

In the ten months that he was at the Ecole he won 
no special marks. He never was an officer of the corps or 



SCHOOLDAYS IN FRANCE 21 

head of the mess. He got along well with his teachers and 
some of them he never ceased to remember with gratitude. 
In after years there were those who boasted that they had 
recognised his genius, but poor Baur, the German teacher, 
never could live down a remark he made one day in Septem- 
ber, 1785. 

"Where is M. de Bonaparte?" he asked, as he looked over 
the class. 

"In for the artillery examination," some one replied. 

' ' What ! Does he know anything ? ' ' 

"Why, he is one of the best mathematicians in the school." 

"Oh, I have always thought that only idiots were fit to 
study mathematics." 

Napoleon was examined by LaPlace, the celebrated mathe- 
matician and astronomer. And among the fifty-six young 
men who passed, he stood forty-two from the top ! 

His long and hard apprenticeship in the trade of the sword 
was finished at last and he was now at the threshold of another 
six years' apprenticeship, which held privations more bitter 
still, an apprenticeship in the great school of life. 



CHAPTER in 
BEFORE THE DAWN 

1785-1793 AGE 16-23 

AFTER graduating from the Ecole Militaire, Napoleon 
received an officer's commission, but he had to borrow 
from his classmate, Des Mazis, the money to enable 
him to join his regiment which was in garrison at Valence, 
400 miles south of Paris. 

Valence is an attractive old town of almost 30,000 popula- 
tion, close to the upper border of Provence, where, seated well 
above the banks of the River Rhone, between Lyons and 
Avignon, it looks across a vine-grown plain to the Alpine 
foothills of Dauphiny on one side and the gentle mountains of 
Cevennes on the other. 

It is but a step from the new to old Valence, where the little 
streets twist and turn and tumble down to the wide, swift 
river. In the centre of it stands the cathedral, and nearby 
at the corner of the winding Grande Rue and the still nar- 
rower Rue Croissant is No. 48, a shockingly modern four- 
story business block without an identifying tablet or even 
a street number on its front. Yet there the eaglet perched 
for awhile and gave Valence its admission ticket to the pages 
of history. 

Apparently the present tenants are unconscious of the re- 
flected glory in which they dwell, and it is difficult to recall 
to their memory the days of 1785-86, when a melancholy 
stripling came and went in their winding lane of a Grande 
Rue. For at No. 48, Mile. Bou, a spinster who kept house 
for her old father, lodged Second Lieut. Bonaparte at some- 
what less than $2 a month. As sub or second lieutenant of 

22 



BEFORE THE DAWN 23 

the regiment of La Frere, his monthly income was $20, which 
after all deductions, left him $7 for clothes and extras. 

Poverty was one of his best teachers in those days, when 
he pulled in his belt at mealtime and feasted on Rousseau, 
Voltaire and other nourishers of his mind. When he ate a 
real meal, which generally was only once a day, he walked 
along the Grande Rue into the Place des Clercs, and thence 
turned into the little Rue Perollerie, where he used to dine at 
the Three Pigeons restaurant, with one eye on the bill of fare 
and the other on the few cents to which he limited his appetite. 

He remained as unattractive in appearance as he had been 
from birth, with a presence almost uncanny. Visiting a Cor- 
sican in a nearby town, the earliest existing portrait of him 
was drawn by his young host. It is a crude piece of art, but 
it serves as evidence of his uncomely youth. 

The only social life he could afford was the simplest, which, 
however, is always the best. He brought a letter from the 
Archbishop of Autun, nephew of his old benefactor, Count 
Marbeuf, the French Governor of Corsica, introducing him 
to the abbe of St. Ruff at the old abbaye, now the prefecture 
for the department of the Drone, down near the foot of the 
Grande Rue. The abbe was a man in touch with the prog- 
ress of thought and the Abbe Raynal, whom the boy officer 
also came to know there, ranked at the time among the fore- 
most philosophers of France. 

At the abbaye, too, this youth of sixteen, who had left home 
at nine and been brought up in a monastery, formed an ac- 
quaintance with a hitherto unknown species of the human 
race, a girl, Mile. Colombier, and the shadow of this little 
French lass was caught for all time on the films in the mov- 
ing picture of Napoleon's life. Her mother invited him oft, 
and while he said afterward that he was in love with mademoi- 
selle we have no other detail of their brief romance than that 
they picked and ate cherries together in her orchard. 

Woman's looks never were to be Napoleon's books. The 
Maison des Tetes stood opposite Mile. Bou's lodging house 
and the hoary heads sculptured on its front still grin and 
glower on the wayfarer by the Grande Rue. There used to 



24 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

be a bookseller in that house of the heads, and the gaunt shade 
of the second lieutenant haunts the old place to this day. We 
may see him. with covetous eyes still bending over the book 
stalls and calculating how many weeks he must wait to save 
enough out of his $7 of spare money each month to buy some 
work which he longed to carry to his lonely den across the 
street. 

Those were the brave and ingenuous days, as he afterwards 
confessed, when he would have died to uphold the social doc- 
trines of Jean Jacques Rousseau and when he read Goethe's 
"Werther" five times, while he lived these mournful lines in 
"Wilhelm Meister:" 

Who never ate his bread in sorrow, 
Who never spent the darksome hours 
Weeping and watching for the morrow — 
He knows ye not, ye gloomy Powers. 

In his first spring time at Valence, while the cherries were 
red on Mme. Colombier's trees, Napoleon, already gloomy and 
peculiar, but yet far from grand, sat down in his bare room 
at No. 48 and thus poured forth upon the pages of his diary 
the bitterness of his soul: 

Always alone when in the midst of men, I return to my room to 
dream by myself and to give myself up to the full tide of my melan- 
choly. What, forsooth, am I here for in this world? Since death 
must come to me, why would it not be as well to kill myself? . . . 
Since I begin life in suffering misfortune, and nothing gives me 
pleasure, why should I endure these days when nothing with which 
I am concerned prospers? 

Nevertheless he did not jump into the Rhone. On the con- 
trary, he went on reading, reading, writing, writing, study- 
ing, studying, tracing out the institutions of all ages and lands 
and training his mind for the hidden future. If he had read 
his destiny in the book of fate he could not have chosen a 
better mental preparation for it. 

"When he had been with his regiment less than a year, he 
received a leave of absence and went home taking two trunks, 



BEFORE THE DAWN 25 

but the larger one was filled with books. After having been 
away nearly eight years, he came back a Corsican of the Corsi- 
cans, but to find the fortunes of his family at low ebb, his 
mother without a servant and much of the time her own laun- 
dress and seamstress. 

He did not rejoin his regiment until he had been absent 
from it more than twenty months. It was now at Auxonne, 
much farther north and between Dijon and the Swiss frontier, 
where again his one diversion from the irksome regimental 
routine and his galling poverty was afforded by his unfailing 
friends, his books and his pen. 

"Heaven knows what privations!" he exclaimed when, in 
after life, he looked back on those days at Auxonne. "Do 
you know how I managed it? It was by never setting foot 
inside a cafe or appearing in the social world. . It was by 
eating dry bread. ... I lived like a bear. . . . When by dint 
of abstinence I amassed the sum of twelve livres, I turned my 
steps with the joy of a child toward the shop of a bookseller." 

The less he had and the less he ate, the more he read and 
wrote, the harder he worked. Going to bed at ten, he was 
up by four and at his littered table. The half-fed genius was 
in a frenzy of literary composition, turning off nearly thirty 
papers on as many different subjects, only to be rebuffed by 
the publishers of three cities. He wrote historical and philo- 
sophical essays, novels and plays, but none ever achieved the 
triumph of the types. 

Then the Bastille fell. The great Revolution was on and, 
spreading like a prairie fire, it was at Auxonne in five days, 
where it took the form of a riot. The stirring events aroused 
Napoleon from his literary dreams. He must have a part in 
the new era of action. But not in Auxonne, nor in Paris, nor 
anywhere in France. No, he must hasten to the one object of 
his thoughts, Corsica. 

Turning his back upon France in the midst of her history- 
making and going to Ajaccio, it might almost be said that he 
carried the Revolution with him. He restlessly promoted the 
formation of revolutionary clubs and machinery, while he 
stalked the floor of his room at night reading and declaiming 



26 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Cesar's Commentaries and other narratives of heroic action. 

He returned to his regiment at Auxonne, after an absence 
of a year and three quarters. If he had found it hard to live 
on $20 a month when alone, he must now endure greater hard- 
ships, for he had brought his twelve-year-old broth?r Louis 
with him. He hoped to get the boy into a military school, 
but while waiting to have the government take him off his 
hands he must be his teacher. 

The desertion of aristocratic officers from the army thrust 
upon Napoleon a promotion to a first lieutenancy and he re- 
ceived orders to return to Valence, where he went back to his 
old lodgings at Mile. Bou's and became the secretary of a 
revolutionary club. This was the period of Louis XVI 's at- 
tempted flight and arrest. The tide was moving with increas- 
ing swiftness — but Napoleon once more returned to Corsica 
to seek martial glory with the new island militia which was 
organising as a part of the national guard. "The post of 
honour of a good Corsican," said this lieutenant in the army 
of France, ' ' is in his own country. ' ' 

After a long and exciting struggle he won the election to 
the lieutenant colonelcy in the Corsican national guard. At 
the same time, he raised up a life-long enemy in the person of 
Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, whose family homestead stands 
to this day on the Rue Napoleon, near the Bonaparte house. 
All Europe became the theatre of the vendetta between those 
two young Corsicans, Pozzo proving to be Napoleon's most 
relentless nemesis. Echoes of their feud still are heard in 
Ajaccio, whither descendants of Pozzo have brought stones 
from the demolished palace of the Napoleons, the Tuileries at 
Paris, and with them have erected a country house, the most 
conspicuous structure on the mountain side above the Bay of 
Ajaccio. 

In his absorbing ambition to lead the Corsican national 
guard Napoleon had ignored the peremptory order for all 
army officers to return to their posts, and ignored as well the 
peril of the nation exposed to foreign invasion. "Bonaparte, 
first lieutenant, . . . has given up his profession and been 
replaced on Feb. 6, 1792," so ran the records of his regiment. 



BEFORE THE DAWN 27 

Going to Paris to recover his abandoned place in the army, 
he entered the capital, out of a job and a man without a coun- 
try. His coming was well timed for his further education. 
For he saw Paris in the midst of the painful travail that at- 
tended the birth of the first Republic. 

Falling in with Bourrienne, his old chum at Brienne, they 
shared their poverty, but Bourrienne has insisted that Na- 
poleon was the poorer and had to pawn his watch. With the 
rising tide of the Revolution already up to their ankles, this 
well met pair were so little stirred that they could coolly dis- 
cuss over their six-cent dinners, which Bourrienne says he 
generally paid for, the opening of a real estate agency and a 
prosaic business partnership. 

One day in the Rue des Petit Champs, Napoleon met "a 
crowd of hideous men," according to his description, bearing 
aloft a human head on a pike. They demanded that he cry 
"Vive la Nation," and he has assured us, "I did it without 
difficulty, as you may believe." The young disciple of Rous- 
seau was being introduced at close range to the terrible reali- 
ties of the Revolution which to him had been only an ab- 
straction. 

He and Bourrienne followed the mob in its first attack on 
the Tuileries in June, 1792, and, from the terraced bank of 
the Seine, viewed a riotous assemblage swarming in the palace, 
chopping its way through the doors with hatchets and com- 
pelling the King to put on the red cap of liberty. Bourrienne 
reports his companion indignantly shouting, "Why have they 
let in all that rabble? They should sweep off 400 or 500 of 
them with the cannon ; the rest of them would then set off fast 
enough." In a letter to a brother, Napoleon solemnly com- 
mented on the occurrence, "All this is unconstitutional and 
sets a very dangerous example ; it is difficult to see what will 
become of the Empire under these stormy circumstances." 

When the palace was sacked in August, Bourrienne was 
gone from Paris, but his friend was loitering in the streets as 
usual and was caught up in the swirling tumult. There were 
shops in those days between the Louvre and the Tuileries, 
where Napoleon's Arch of the Carrousel now stands, and 



28 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Bourrienne's uncle kept one of them. Thither Napoleon has- 
tened to watch the storming of the palace, the deadly battle 
between the people and the Swiss Guard, and the flight of the 
royal family to the national assembly in the tennis court, 
whose site is now occupied by the Hotel Continental. 

While in Paris Napoleon not only succeeded in having his 
name restored to the army lists, but also received promotion to 
a captaincy. Yet, with the Germans on French soil and Paris 
passing into the dark shadows of the Reign of Terror, he 
begged another leave and returned once more to the little 
island out of the world. He had now been in the army seven 
years, and absent from duty more than half the time ! 

In the course of the following winter in Corsica, he took 
part for the first time in a military campaign as commander 
of the artillery in an expedition designed to carry the Revo- 
lution into the neighbouring island of Sardinia. In the long 
period of preparation he was at Bonifacio, a weirdly pic- 
turesque Corsican port, where he lodged opposite the old house 
in which Charles V stayed more than two centuries before. 
The expedition resulted in a fiasco, and the Bonapartists, ac- 
cusing Paoli of desiring the failure of the campaign, the breach 
between the young Corsican and the old grew wider still. 

While both were fervent Corsicans, one had received his 
political training in England and the other in France. As 
the Revolution developed, Paoli was steadily driven back upon 
the English moderation which he had acquired in his exile 
among a people who always believe in going ahead slowly. 
In the veins of the younger man the warm blood of Italy 
coursed untamed. He was still Italian and something more 
intense than that, a Corsican, and not yet the calculating man 
of the great world. 

When early in 1793 war was declared between France and 
England, Corsicans had to choose between the French who 
held the forts of the island and the British whose warships 
lay at the harbour mouths. Turning with a shudder from 
France under the Terror, Paoli naturally looked to his Eng- 
lish friends and welcomed an English protectorate. Napoleon, 



BEFORE THE DAWN 29 

on the other hand, chose a broad path and became a French- 
man at last. 

After various adventures he joined the representatives of 
the French revolutionary government in the island and en- 
gaged in a footless expedition organised to capture Ajaccio 
from the Paolists. Despairing of the success of this move- 
ment he sent a courier to warn his mother. ''Prepare your- 
self, ' ' he wrote, ' ' this country is not for us. ' ' 

Letizia was lying on a couch in the Bonaparte house one 
evening when the courier and a band of faithful followers 
burst in upon her. As she sprang up she feared she was in 
the hands of the Paolists, but by the light of their pine torches 
she recognised the rough but friendly mountaineers who had 
come to save her. "Be quick, Signora Letizia!" cried the 
leader. "Paoli's people are hard on our heels. There is not 
a moment to lose. We will save you or die with you ! ' ' 

With the Abbe Fesch, her son Louis and her daughters 
Elisa and Pauline she fled along the shore, having been obliged 
to leave behind two of her children, Caroline and Jerome, who 
were too young to endure the hardships of such a journey. 
Before morning the Paolists had broken into the homestead 
in the Rue St. Charles and by smashing and burning they laid 
waste the interior of the house. 

Plainly the fortunes of the Bonapartes were at an end in 
the island. They had been driven from their home and de- 
nounced by formal resolution : ' ' It is beneath the dignity of 
the Corsican people to trouble themselves about the families 
of Arena and Bonaparte; they abandon them to their own 
private remorse and to public opinion, which has already con- 
demned them to perpetual execration and infamy." 

The proscribed Bonapartes gathered under a friendly roof 
at Calvi and watched for an opportunity to escape from their 
native land. As Calvi was their last refuge in Corsica, so it 
became the last refuge of all who resisted the transfer of the 
island to England. Climbing up from the harbour, cun- 
ningly hid in the mountains, to the old town, a civic mummy 
sealed in its two or three casings of stony battlements, the 



30 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

traveller finds Calvi's two proudest boasts inscribed on its 
time-scarred and bullet riddled walls. The first is engraved 
above its gate: "Always Faithful," and the second is 
carved on a heap of ruins which purports to have been the 
birthplace of Christopher Columbus. 

While Calvi has not established this latter boast to the sat- 
isfaction of history, it made good its other boast before it sur- 
rendered to the English ships in 1794. For it held out until 
25,000 bullets, 6500 bombs and 1500 shells had rained upon it, 
and it looks to-day as if it had as many scars as that to show 
for the long siege. Besides Horatio Nelson paid an eye — the 
historic eye, which afterward won the Battle of Copenhagen — 
for his part in the subjugation of this stubborn old town. 

The British frigates were already gathering off Calvi when 
the prow of a little boat, with its cargo of future sovereigns 
and princes cut through the waters on Napoleon's first exile 
and bore him from the mountainous shore to his destiny. Cor- 
sica never has ceased to repent her banishment of him or 
wearied in bringing forth works meet for repentance. Long 
ago she unanimously ratified his choice of nationality and is 
to-day as French as France. 

The Ajaccians indeed are still voting for Napoleon. The 
island as a whole may have been more or less won over to the 
Republic. At least candidates bearing the republican label 
are elected to sit in the chamber of deputies at Paris, although 
some of them never overcome the suspicion of the ministry 
that they are Bonapartists in disguise. 

Ajaccio does not stoop to dissemble. She is Bonapartist 
first, last and all the time. An Ajaccian returns from a pil- 
grimage to Prince Victor at Brussels like a Mahometan from 
Mecca, and the glasses clink at the Cafe Napoleon on the 
Cours Napoleon to the health and success of the pretender to 
the throne of the Bonapartes. Every man in the street seems 
to be saying to the passing stranger: "Behold, I am of the 
Napoleon breed, and Napoleon was nothing more than a Corsi- 
can who had a fair chance in the world!" 



CHAPTER IV 
THE MAN ON HORSEBACK 

1793-1795 AGE 23-26 

BANISHED from Corsica, the Bonapartes landed in 
France in June of 1793, with hardly more than the 
poor clothes they wore and without a door opening to 
welcome them. Yet even as they stepped ashore at Toulon, 
opportunity, though unseen, waited for one of the penniless 
refugees across only a mile or so of water by the grassy ram- 
parts of La Seyne. 

Had Napoleon's career, however, ended beneath the waves 
of the Mediterranean in his flight from Calvi to Toulon, the 
Corsican historians could have dismissed him in a line as a 
rashly importunate young man who died at four and twenty 
after having failed in every undertaking whether with the pen 
or the sword. A prolific author without a publisher, a sol- 
dier for nearly eight years who in the midst of great wars 
never had been in battle, failure was writ large on his gloomy 
brow as he stepped ashore at Toulon and led his mother and 
brothers and sisters to official headquarters where they threw 
themselves on the charity of the government. 

As refugees from the enemies of France the family received 
rude shelter in a village on the side of Mt. Faron, which rises 
back of Toulon. The gossips of history say they slept at first 
on straw piles and cooked in a broken pot the raw rations 
issued to them by the commissary. Afterward they were in- 
stalled in comparative comfort under a peasant's roof in a 
village on the shore. 

Robespierre was at the height of his ruthless power that 
red summer, defying the armies of allied Europe at the fron- 
tiers and beating down the Girondists in a civil war at home. 

31 



32 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

After Napoleon had drifted about, unattached and doing odd 
jobs for the army, he returned to Toulon and asked his fellow- 
Corsican, Salicetti, to let him. take part in the siege there. 
Thus at the end of summer, he was back at his starting point, 
but this time he was not in the bread line. He had come now 
to inscribe the name of Toulon first on the list of his victories. 

The obscure little artilleryman at once felt his superiority 
to the amateur talent engaged in the siege, and he quickly 
saw that the rebellious town, floating the white banner of the 
Bourbons, was enabled to maintain its resistance to the Re- 
public only by the assistance of the warships of England and 
other nations which lay in its two harbours. His strategic 
eye lighted on this single fact and ignored all else. Gen- 
eral Carteaux, the commander, in hurling his soldiers against 
the forts in the rear of the town had only been pulling the 
coat-tails of Toulon. Napoleon, like a good anatomist, saw 
that the one and only thing to do was to take Toulon by its 
harbour throat and choke it into submission. While the ships 
remained, it was as absurd to capture the place as it would 
be to capture a red-hot stove. It could not be held ; it would 
have to be dropped. 

When a council of war was held to listen to some lengthy 
instructions from the parlour strategists of Paris, telling just 
how Toulon should be taken, the lean and sallow captain of 
artillery rose to dissent. Stepping to a military map, he 
placed his finger on a point of land at the mouth of the har- 
bour, several miles from the fortifications of the town, and 
said in a truly Napoleonic epigram, "Toulon is there!" 

Napoleon's startling announcement that Toulon is not at 
Toulon may be verified to-day. It is really at the next station, 
La Seyne, a busy ship-building town of 20,000 population, 
with ferries and street cars running between it and the larger 
place across the harbour. The fierce wind which tears down 
the valley of the Ehone, blows through the town in a whirling 
mistral, past sidewalks littered with empty cafe tables, past 
the high wall of a shipyard to l'Eguillette. There a green 
hill rises from the road ; there Napoleon received his real bap- 
tism of fire and there he first tasted success. 



THE MAN ON HORSEBACK 33 

The British had also recognised the vital importance of this 
promontory and before Napoleon could set up a battery they 
landed and strongly fortified the point, naming their princi- 
pal fort, "Little Gibraltar." But they very kindly left him 
a commanding height close by and there he immediately began 
to erect his batteries. 

One of his forts was almost within pistol shot of "Little 
Gibraltar" and by no means an inviting place. But its 
builder nailed to it a sign on which was rudely printed in big 
letters this legend : 



THE BATTERY OF MEN 
WITHOUT FEAR 



That was enough, and volunteers swarmed into the perilous 
place. Their commander daily showed his contempt for dan- 
ger. Once while he was dictating a report to a sergeant a 
shell burst on the earthworks above their heads and covered 
with dirt the undried ink. The soldier only smiled at this 
close call and coolly said as he shook the sheet: "Good! I 
shan't need any sand to blot this." The admiring commander 
recognised a man after his own heart and in that lucky moment 
Sergeant Junot had bound himself for life to the fortunes of 
Napoleon. 

On a wild and stormy night in December, 1793, nearly two 
months after Napoleon's arrival at Toulon, when the wind 
was howling and blowing the rain in sheets and the lightning 
cracked and flashed in the darkness, his plan of campaign was 
put to the supreme test. Against the advice of the commis- 
sioners and notwithstanding the fears of most of the officers, 
the French made a dash at "Little Gibraltar." They were 
beaten back again and again. But the fight continued until 
three o'clock in the morning, when with his men behind him, 
Captain Muiron, to the undying admiration of Napoleon, 
climbed the slope of the enemy 's fort, rushed through a breach 



34 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

in its wall, and cut down the English and Spaniards at their 
guns. 

"Little Gibraltar" lost, the other shore batteries of the 
British were useless. Their defenders leaped into the water 
and swam to the ships. Just as Napoleon had predicted weeks 
before, the town of Toulon fell without receiving a shot. The 
fleet hurried away, the magazines were blown up in a terrific 
explosion, and the flames from the burning stores lit the sky, 
while the population of Toulon struggled to escape by sea 
from Robespierre's avenging messengers. 

The historic hill rising from l'Eguillette bears to this day 
the name of Fort Napoleon. Among its bushes still may be 
traced the earthworks where stood the men of the "Battery 
Without Fear," while high above its grassy summit the flag 
of France rides the gale. 

Down at the foot of the hill is an old grey fort which Car- 
dinal Richelieu constructed, and beyond are the green parks 
and red roofs of the villas of ship builders and merchants in 
the pretty seaside suburb of Tamaris, in one of which ' ' George 
Sands" wrote her romance of that name, while on the other 
hand, the mountainous side of Six Fours forms a background. 

Standing on Napoleon's hill it is plainly to be seen that 
1 ' Toulon is here, ' ' and that the French have not forgotten the 
lesson taught by Napoleon. For to-day the entire shore is the 
hiding place of modern batteries for the protection of the great 
naval port of France. 

His first battle brought the little artilleryman the rank of 
brigadier general and an assignment to the Army of Italy, 
as the French force destined for an Italian campaign was 
called. As the youthful brigadier passed along the lovely 
Riviera on his various missions to and fro, he looked up the 
narrow passes, the open gates in the great, high walls of the 
Maritime Alps, which, like huge breakwaters, rise almost sheer 
from the ivory shore of the Mediterranean. It was while peer- 
ing through those gateways to Italy that a plan of campaign 
far greater than that of Toulon started in his mind. 

Just then there came another revolution in Paris. It was 
Robespierre's turn at the guillotine, and as his head fell in the 




An Early Portrait oi Napollon, r.v Baiixx 



THE MAN ON HORSEBACK 35 

sack, the new party in the government at once began to mark 
out for the same fate all the chief associates of the fallen 
Terrorist. 

Napoleon quickly found himself in a cell and under orders 
to report in Paris, whose other name was the guillotine in those 
days. Fortunately for the prisoner, the guillotine was weary 
at last, and after eight days in confinement he was liberated, 
but only to meet troubles no less annoying. 

Ordered to join the infantry in the Army of the "West, he 
went to Paris to remonstrate against his transfer from the 
artillery. The orders were not changed, but he contrived to 
go over the head of the bureaucrat who had assigned him to 
the infantry and he gained the attention of more powerful 
men in the government. 

The dream of the Orient, which was long to haunt him, 
came to him now and he induced the authorities to order him 
to Turkey for the purpose of training and strengthening the 
army of the Sultan as a possible ally of France. On the same 
day that he obtained this favour from one department, his 
name was erased from the list of generals by another depart- 
ment because he had disregarded no less than three orders to 
join the Army of the West. While he was in this plight, 
busily striving to have his name restored and to get together a 
staff for his Constantinople trip, the real opportunity of his 
life came to him in the very streets of Paris. 

All American visitors in the French capital have seen, but 
probably few have observed the battlefield where Napoleon 
won a victory as important and decisive as any that ever fell 
to his sword. For there he took Paris. This field lies in the 
very heart of the city, in the familiar Paris of the tourist, 
between the boulevards and the river, with the Tuileries as 
the focal point. 

The broad steps of the Church of St. Roch in the Rue St. 
Honore are a famous landmark on this battlefield. There, 
with his "whiff of grapeshot," the little artilleryman really 
brought the great Revolution to an end. 

The people longed for repose and a peaceful adjustment 
to the new conditions. But scheming politicians and plotting 



36 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Bourbons would not let the Republic rest and once more Paris 
was threatened with an uprising. The government of the day 
naturally enough turned to the friendless young officer out 
of a job. 

The attempted revolution came one day in early October, 
in the year 1795. It was by no means a ragged mob which 
moved through the streets toward the old royal riding school 
— where the Hotel Continental now is — on the 13th Vende- 
miaire, according to the republican calendar. This Bourbon 
and revolutionary uprising might properly be called a broad- 
cloth mob, but it really was not a mob at all. It was an army 
whose main force consisted of no less than 30,000 or 40,000 
armed and drilled troops of the national guard. Napoleon's 
forces, on the other hand, numbered only 5000 or 6000 sol- 
diers, or regulars, as we would say, but they had the cruel 
advantage of artillery. 

As the insurrectionary troops from various directions drew 
near their goal, they were met always at the vital point by 
the cannon of the much smaller but more soldierly forces of 
regular and veteran troops. Everywhere they were con- 
fronted by a plan of campaign in which nothing had been 
left to chance. Napoleon had treated the square mile of city 
streets surrounding the Tuileries like a chess board, and the 
defensive forces had been posted at all the vantage points by 
a master of strategy. 

For hours the two forces had stood stock still, facing each 
other, in the Rue St. Honore, when late in the afternoon 
some one fired a wild shot from an upper window of a house 
close by the Church of St. Roch. That shot was the lighted 
match in the powder and a fusillade instantly followed, the 
echo of which, floating through the streets, was the signal for 
an outbreak at other points. 

Soon the crackling reverberations of the muskets were lost 
in the awful boom of the cannon, which shook the windows 
of Paris. The musketry wavered, rallied for a moment and 
then fled in a wild rout. In an hour it was all ended, with 
200 dead lying in the streets. When the bells in the towers 
of the great capital struck twelve at midnight their peals rang 



THE MAN ON HORSEBACK 37 

over a city as quiet as a countryside after a thunder shower. 
After years of turbulence Paris had met her master. In 
that crowded hour, she had seen him here, there and every- 
where, his long hair falling over his shoulders, his thin boyish 
figure wreathed in the smoke of his cannon, but not yet know- 
ing even the name of Napoleon Bonaparte, she spoke of the 
mysterious stranger only as "the man on horseback." 



CHAPTER V 

A LOVE STORY 

WHILE all Paris was bowing before the victor of 
Vendemiaire in 1795, the conqueror himself was 
conquered and the little artilleryman was van- 
quished by the little bowman. 

Piloted by fortune from opposite ends of the earth, one 
from the old world, the other from the new, one from an 
island in the Mediterranean, the other from an island in the 
Caribbean, a boy and a girl, a Corsican and a Creole, Na- 
poleon and Josephine, landed on the shore of France in 
1778-79, the boy to enter a school for the youthful nobility, 
the girl to be the bride of a nobleman. 

After five years both were in Paris, but as effectually di- 
vided by the narrow Seine as when in childhood the wide 
seas rolled between them. Leaving the capital, the Corsican 
returned to his native land, the Creole to hers, only to be 
caught, both of them, in the wide-spreading whirlpool of the 
Revolution and drawn together at its centre. 

Once more in France, but still unknown to each other, they 
drifted about for two or three years without crossing paths. 
The Reign of Terror came, and while Napoleon was winning 
his first laurels under Robespierre at Toulon, Josephine was 
thrown into prison and her husband sent to the guillotine. 
With Robespierre's fall they changed places, the prison door 
swinging open for Josephine and closing in upon Napoleon. 

Thus for fifteen years did prankish fortune sport with 
this pair. 

Josephine's life was filled with vicissitudes not less strange 
than Napoleon's. She was descended from a family of the 
poor country nobility of France which had emigrated to the 

38 



A LOVE STORY 39 

island of Martinique less than forty years before her birth. 
Her father, a plodding, unambitious sugar planter of Trois 
Islets, across the bay from Fort de France, compromised with 
his disappointment when a girl was born to him by giving 
her a half boyish name: Marie Joseph Rose Tascher de la 
Pagerie. But her mother called her Yvette. 

When the little Creole was only three, a West Indian hurri- 
cane swept away her home while the family hid in a cave, 
and nothing was left but the kitchen wing to mark her birth- 
place. The father could not afford to rebuild and, picking 
up such pieces of furniture as he could find in the wreckage, 
he moved his family into the loft of his sugar mill. 

There Josephine grew up, care-free and happy as her black 
playmates, a troop of little slaves arrayed in the livery of 
the burnished sun. Books and lessons troubled her not at all, 
and her only schooling was received in two or three terms at 
a convent in Fort de France. 

Trois Islets had no social life to restrain her with its for- 
malities and vanities. "I ran, I jumped, I danced from 
morning till night," was her own description of her girlhood. 
Not even the prophecy she had heard pronounced in the hut 
of a fortune teller cast a shadow upon this daughter of the 
sun. Yet had she not been warned by the black prophetess 
that one day she would be greater than queen and after hav- 
ing two crowns, lose both? 

Before Josephine was born, the Marquis de Beauharnais 
was the royal governor of the Island of Martinique, and in 
the government house at Fort de France his son, the Viscount 
Alexandre de Beauharnais, was born. Josephine had an aunt, 
Mme. Renaudine, and no doubt it was her matchmaking am- 
bition which inspired the Marquis with the idea of marrying 
his son, the Viscount, to a daughter of the poor and undistin- 
guished colonial planter of Trois Islets. After he had re- 
turned to Paris, the Marquis wrote back to the Taschers pro- 
posing the marriage, but the hand of a younger daughter was 
requested, because Josephine was too near the boy 's age, which 
was seventeen. 

While that letter was on its slow way this second daughter 



40 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

died, but M. Tascher rose to the emergency like a born diplo- 
mat. After recording her death in his reply to the Marquis 
he affected to offer the third daughter, who was not yet twelve. 
Then he added in a sly postscript that he feared Josephine 
would be put out by her omission from the journey to France 
and that he wished he could send both girls. "But how can 
I separate a mother from her two remaining daughters, so 
soon after the third has been snatched from her by death?" 

By this time the Marquis notified M. Tascher to send over 
whichever girl he pleased and even sent authority for the 
announcement of the banns at Fort de France, generously 
leaving a blank line for the name of the bride. Of course 
Josephine's name was inserted, and on this left-handed invi- 
tation, she sailed for France in the company of her father, 
landing at Brest with her doll in her arms. 

This not being a love story it is well to finish it speedily. 
Alexandre and Josephine were married and went to live in 
the town and country mansions of the Beauharnais. Utterly 
unsuited and useless to each other, the Viscount happily could 
stay away much of the time with the army, while Josephine 
took captive all her new and distinguished relatives, including 
the Rochefaucaulds, the Montmorencys and the Rohans. Al- 
though she never had entered a drawing room or dined in 
state, her native grace and taste, with a little coaching by her 
aunt, saved her. 

The birth of a son, Eugene, and later the coming of a 
daughter, Hortense, did not recall Alexandre to his fireside 
for long. After seeking diversion in the army, in Italy and 
even in Martinique, where he said very disagreeable things 
about his wife, there came a legal separation and the dividing 
up of the children. The father took Eugene, and Josephine 
with her baby girl returned to the loft of the sugar mill of 
Trois Islets. 

While she was renewing the memories of her childhood 
there, the Revolution burst upon France and the Viscount 
plunged into the movement. In the awakening of his emo- 
tions, he felt a desire to be reconciled with Josephine, who, 
although he had branded her a "vile creature," listened as a 




Josephine, by Prud'hon 



A LOVE STORY 41 

wife and mother to his appeals for her return to him and 
Eugene. Against the protests of her father, who was already 
in his mortal illness, and to the lasting displeasure of her 
mother, she sailed for France. 

The reunited family shared the fortunes of Citizen Beau- 
harnais through three stormy years. Twice he was chosen 
to be president of the national assembly, and he rode the wild 
waves of political agitation very well until he was sent out as 
commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine. His campaign 
failing, he was recalled to Paris and cast into prison. While 
Josephine was interceding for his life, at the height of the 
Great Terror, she herself was arrested and locked up as a 
disloyal aristocrat. 

The Terror had converted the palaces and monasteries into 
prisons and crowded them with the proudest and meanest of 
France. Beauharnais was confined in the palace of the Lux- 
embourg and his wife was almost across the street in the Car- 
melite Monastery. 

Between the Luxembourg and the familiar Theatre de 
l'Odeon on the Rue Vaugirard rises still the chapel of Jo- 
sephine's prison, the Church of St. Joseph des Cannes. Down 
in its crypt one may see to-day mementoes of the horrible 
massacre of the prisoners which took place at the monastery in 
the September before her arrest, and many tombs of those 
who were butchered in the Hundred Hours of bloody memory. 

Beauharnais was permitted to pay a parting visit to his 
wife. Then his last day came, and he bought back from the 
barber who prepared his head for the guillotine, a lock of his 
hair to send to Josephine and the children. The wife made 
ready to follow her husband to the scaffold, and she wrote her 
farewell letter to Eugene and Hortense. But just then 
Robespierre himself was flung into the tumbril of death and 
the prison doors swung open. 

Josephine returned to the world as from her grave, the 
widowed and penniless mother of two children. Almost noth- 
ing really is known of her eighteen months of widowhood, 
though much has been told, mostly in such a venomous spirit 
that a prudent person dare not touch it. From the beginning 



42 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

to the end of that precarious period she was continually draw- 
ing upon her mother, now a widow like herself. She threw 
herself upon her bounty as ' ' my sole support, ' ' and again she 
wrote her as her "poor Yvette:" "I know too well your 
regard for my honour to have the least doubt that you will 
supply me with the means for subsistence." 

At last came the day of Vendemiaire, big with fate, when 
from the cannon's mouth the little artilleryman spoke to re- 
bellious Paris and it paused in the presence of its master, ' ' the 
man on horseback." The wilful city was commanded to give 
up its arms as a guarantee of good behaviour in the future, 
and the soldiers went from house to house to take away the 
weapons of the insurgent population. The widow Beau- 
harnais, wishing to keep her husband's sword as a heritage 
for her fourteen-year-old son, sent Eugene to headquarters to 
beg its return. 

So the tale was told by both Napoleon and Eugene, and 
if it is too good to be true it is also too good to be spoiled by 
sceptics who have no story to take its place. 

The boy wept at the sight of his father's sword and kissed 
its hilt. Napoleon was touched and patted him on the head. 
Eugene's enthusiastic report at home of the General's kind- 
ness excited the gratitude of his widowed mother, who has- 
tened to call and express her thanks. 

Although she was announced as "the Citizeness Beauhar- 
nais," the rustic nobleman from Corsica did not miss the im- 
pressive fact that his caller was the Viscountess de Beau- 
harnais, a resounding name of the ancient regime. He saw 
in her the graceful impersonation of the great aristocracy 
of old France, and felt that for the first time he stood in the 
presence of a grande dame. 

Did she not look the part to perfection? Regally tall and 
charmingly slender, not even a girdle was needed to support 
her dainty bosom; her eyes were soft and appealing; her 
sensitive little nose was retroussee, or turned up, as we ungal- 
lantly say in English. Parisian art had cleverly repelled the 
assaults of time, and her arching mouth was so small that it 
did not permit her unfortunate teeth to obtrude themselves 



A LOVE STORY 43 

upon her enchanting smile, while in her every motion there 
was the languorous ease of the Creole and the highly polished 
grace of the French salon. 

The enraptured Corsican did not yet know that she was 
only a little islander like himself, and as fast as his new car- 
riage could take him on the field of action, the strategist of 
Toulon opened a campaign in which a widow's strategy was 
to leave him as helpless as a child. 

The tide in his affairs was swiftly swelling to the flood. 
Already he was General-in-chief of the Army of the Interior, 
and, as the commandant of Paris, he dwelt in an old palace 
on the Rue Capucine, where he had a salon of his own. In 
his bearing, dejection had given way to confidence. Slapping 
the sword at his side, he boasted to Josephine that it would 
carry him far. She smiled at his self-assurance as something 
drolly boyish, and the wild outbursts of his natural egotism, 
which he had so long been obliged to repress or restrain, must 
have kept her oscillating between suspicions of his genius and 
his madness. 

After her observation of the evanescent quality of military 
reputations and the transitory character of personal success 
under the Republic well may she have hesitated to hitch her 
wagon to the star of this youth. Had she not buckled on 
the armour of one General-in-chief only to see him march 
straight to the guillotine whither half her friends had gone? 

The attempts of her wooer to carry the fortress of her affec- 
tions by storm were a tactical failure. Her heart when it was 
young had been impervious to the assaults of passion, and now 
at thirty-two it was untouched by the Corsican 's frenzied 
attacks upon it. In fine, she seems to have been at once terri- 
fied and fascinated by her pet eagle. But if she let him fly 
away she knew how to call him back, as in this example : 

You no longer come to see a friend who loves you ; you have quite 
forsaken her ; you are very wrong ; for she is passionately devoted to 
you. 

Come to-morrow and breakfast with me; I want to see you and to 
chat with you upon matters concerning your interest. 

Good night, my friend, I embrace you. Veuve Beauharnais. 



44 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The courtship went forward at an ever quickening pace. 
It took the high speed as the Directory, moved toward its 
decision to make the wooer the General-in-chief of the Army 
of Italy. Aunt Renaudine and Aunt Fanny Beauharnais and 
Josephine's father-in-law, the Marquis, filed their approval of 
the alliance, and then it was time to call in the lawyer, which 
is always the signal in France that the love making has come 
to a crisis. 

Napoleon was with his sweetheart when the lawyer arrived. 
But Maitre Raguideau paid no attention to the insignificant 
young man, who was idly looking out the window as he passed 
into Josephine's chamber, where she was still in bed, and the 
lawyer remonstrated with his client so earnestly that the lover 
standing by the window heard through the partly open door 
some of his exclamatory protests : ' ' You are very foolish ! 
You will regret it ! It is madness ! You are going to marry 
a man who has nothing but a cloak and a sword. Surely you 
can make a much better match than this ! ' ' 

But Josephine had passed the stage of argument, and she 
laughingly called in Napoleon, who rose to the occasion by 
complimenting Maitre Raguideau on his frankness and 
promptly retaining him as their joint lawyer! Yet in the 
making of the marriage settlement he frankly confessed that 
he had no real estate and no personal estate other than his 
military uniforms and trappings. 

When the wedding night came, the couple drove to the 
mairie, unattended by a representative of either the bride's 
family or the groom's. The wedding place, which is the one 
spared monument of the marriage of Napoleon and Josephine, 
has become a bank and is as unromantically fiscal in its ap- 
pearance as any bank could be. But this long, low, greyish 
yellow building around the corner from the Avenue de 
1 'Opera, in the Rue d'Antin, has seen gayer days, for it has 
not always been the Paris and Nederlands Bank. It was a 
palace in the gilt age of the Grand Monarch and until it was 
confiscated in the Revolution. Then it became the mairie of 
the second arrondissement, the municipal building of the sec- 
ond ward. 



A LOVE STORY 45 

On the walls of the bank office on the second floor the cupids 
still frolic in a golden frieze. They danced at the mating of 
the widow when the soldier endowed her with all his worldly 
possessions, to wit: 

One sword. 
One cloak. 

For that room, in which now are only desks and office stools, 
was the salle des marriages when Napoleon led his betrothed 
up the stairs at ten o'clock of a March evening in 1796. The 
little bridal party was late for its appointment and the Mayor 
had fallen asleep in his chair. Napoleon went over to him 
and shook him by the shoulder. ' ' Wake up ! Wake up, Mr. 
Mayor, and marry us!" he commanded. 

The marriage rite appears not to have been taken very seri- 
ously but to have been an occasion for some merry pranks 
with the facts. The bride gave her age as twenty-eight, in- 
stead of thirty-two plus, and the groom met her half-way in 
a gallant effort to bridge the gulf of years between them by 
vowing he was born in the same year. 

From the Rue d'Antin, the bride took her husband to her 
rented house, a modest place set in a garden in the Rue 
Chantereine, which he would soon turn into the Rue de la 
Victoire. And it was only six or eight squares to the Tuile- 
ries ! 

The Rue de la Victoire to-day is one of a thousand streets 
of Paris, with its shops on the ground floor and its flats above. 
Josephine's little hotel, the first home Napoleon knew after 
leaving his mother's roof, is gone; but around every lamp post 
in the Rue de la Victoire cluster the memories of the victor of 
Italy and his drawn battle with the widow, not to dwell upon 
his inglorious capitulation to her dog, Fortune, who disputed 
with his teeth the invasion of his mistress' boudoir. 

After a honeymoon of only two days the bridegroom ex- 
changed the pursuit of happiness for the pursuit of glory, 
leaving his bride twirling her second wedding ring, within 
which were engraved the watchwords, "Au Destin!" 



CHAPTER VI 
THE LITTLE CORPORAL 

1798 AGE 26 

FOR a week before his wedding, Napoleon had carried 
in his pocket his commission as General-in-chief of the 
Army of Italy. When his honeymoon was only two 
days old, opportunity and fame refused longer to be put off 
and sternly commanded him to quit the path of dalliance. 

As he went sighing to his new post of duty in March, 1796, 
he scattered a shower of love letters along his way for 760 
miles. At nearly every change of horses the young General- 
in-chief hurried to a tavern table and sought to relieve the 
inflammation from cupid's wound which was consuming his 
breast, by writing a fiery message to the bride he had left 
behind him. 

At the same time, his orders were flying on ahead of him 
and falling like snowflakes on his army, whose veteran gen- 
erals were shocked when the frowzy headed little commander 
presented himself at headquarters and with juvenile ardour 
showed them the portrait of his bride. ' ' But a moment after- 
wards the boy put on a general's hat and seemed to have 
grown two feet," said Massena, who had been a soldier seven- 
teen years. "He questioned us as to the position of our 
divisions and as to the effective force of each corps, told us 
the course which we were to take, announced that he would 
hold an inspection* the next day and attack the enemy the 
day after." 

Why should the Republic of France have staked its for- 
tunes in a war with the greatest empire of the time on this 
youth of twenty-six in the throes of his first love? Why 
should it have chosen for the highest command a young man 

46 



THE LITTLE CORPORAL 47 

who had preferred philosophy, literature, politics, business, 
anything to military service, who had been absent from duty 
more than half the ten years he had held a commission in the 
army, and been twice dismissed? Why should it have ele- 
vated above his seniors an officer who never had held a com- 
mand and who never had been in an active campaign or seen 
more than one battle ? 

Simply because he had an idea! 

His commission as General-in-chief of the Army of Italy 
had been won not by his sword, but by the keen edge of his 
wits; not by his whiff of grapeshot on the 13th Vendemiaire 
nor yet by his cannonading at Toulon, but with pen and paper 
at his desk in Paris, where he had drawn up a brilliant scheme 
of war and statecraft combined. 

An Austrian army was ready for the invasion of France 
and operating with the army of the most martial of the Italian 
states, the kingdom of Sardinia, whose territory stretched 
from the Lake of Geneva over the Alps and down into the 
Plain of Piedmont. Napoleon proposed that the French 
forces, which held only that narrow strip of Mediterranean 
coast which is known as the Riviera, should proceed through 
a pass in the mountains that lay between them and the enemy, 
divide the allied armies, compel the Sardinians separately to 
make peace and then drive the Austrians out of Lombardy, 
which they had held for eighty years. 

Arrived at Savona he found an army of some forty thou- 
sand men in rags, their feet on the ground and many of them 
without bayonets, confronted by a well set-up enemy with 
60,000 soldiers. The new French commander, without means 
to feed or clothe or equip them for a campaign, sought at 
once to distract the thoughts of the men from their wretched 
condition by promising them the spoils of victory. That first 
ringing proclamation disclosed the "lion's paw" that some 
one has said marked all his messages to his troops : 

Soldiers: You are naked, badly fed; the government owes you 
much ; it can give you nothing. Your long suffering, the courage you 
show among these crags are splendid, but they bring you no glory; 
not a ray is reflected upon you. 



48 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

I wish to lead you into the most fertile plains in the world ! Rich 
provinces, great towns will be in your power; there you will find 
honour, glory and riches ! 

Soldiers of Italy, can you be found lacking in honour, courage or 
constancy"? 

From Nice to Genoa there rises a long mountainous range 
with its head in the clouds and its feet in the surf of the Medi- 
terranean. This is the wall of Italy. In all that wall there 
are only four or five gates, one of which opens at Savona. 
But Napoleon fooled the enemy by noisily demanding from 
the government of Genoa a free highway through another pass 
twenty miles to the east. 

Beaulieu, the seventy-one-year-old Austrian commander, 
when he heard of that demand on Genoa, nattered himself he 
saw through the young man's scheme as clearly as through 
the rungs of a ladder. The boy was trying to steal around 
him, and the veteran commander at once began to move his 
main force toward the east to head off the French. Then 
Napoleon shot his main force like a bolt at the weakened 
centre of the allied armies. 

Riding out of Savona at midnight, he climbed twelve miles 
in the shadows of the towering crags of the Ligurian Alps, 
crowned by church steeples and ancient villages, each a refuge 
of civilisation in the dark ages when the corsairs of the Sara- 
cens were the terror of the shore. That steep road is the first 
section in Napoleon's ladder to fame. 

As the day broke that April morning over the heights of 
Montenotte, the soldiers of the Austrian right opened their 
eyes upon the blue coats of France before them in overwhelm- 
ing force. The clash of battle reverberating among the moun- 
tains reached the ears of Beaulieu, miles away, where he was 
leading the left wing of his army toward the pretended point 
of attack. 

He awakened too late to the humiliating fact that the boy 
had played a trick on him. In vain he put forth every effort 
to unite his forces, join his ally and present a solid front to 
the French. 

' ' My nobility dates from Montenotte, ' ' Napoleon boasted in 



THE LITTLE CORPORAL, 49 

all the after years, as he looked back upon that first battle and 
first victory under his generalship. 

Like an agile boxer sparring with two antagonists at once, 
he fell upon the Sardinians the very next day, and drove them 
back. His army now stood like a wedge between the two 
allies and stronger than either alone. In strict accordance 
with the schedule he had drawn up at his desk in Paris, he 
had separated the Austrians and the Sardinians. 

' ' Hannibal crossed the Alps, ' ' he reminded his troops ; "we 
have turned them. ' ' 

Always with a lesser force than the enemy, he won his 
Italian victories by his ability to send more men into battle 
than his opponent. If he adopted Voltaire's cynical remark 
that ' ' God is on the side of the heaviest battalions, ' ' he really 
meant no more than that God is on the side of the man whom 
he has endued with the wisdom to assemble the heaviest bat- 
talions at the point of attack. "An army should be divided 
for subsistence and concentrated for combat." That was the 
keynote of his success throughout all his campaigns. 

After pushing the Sardinian army back on Turin, Napoleon 
had hardly sat down in the fine Salmatori Palace at Cherasco, 
thirty-five miles from the capital, when an old Sardinian 
marshal made his appearance, and announced to the little 
commander of the French that his King was thinking of pro- 
posing terms of peace. "Terms," roared the young man, as 
he pounded a desk, "it is I who name terms; accept them at 
once or Turin is mine, to-morrow ! ' ' 

When the Sardinians tried to haggle with him he pulled 
out his watch, and tapping its face with his finger commanded 
them to sign at once. ' ' I may lose battles, but I will not lose 
minutes." 

It was not long before Murat was speeding on the way to 
Paris with the complete surrender of the kingdom of Sar- 
dinia — and with a letter to Josephine, clamorous and threat- 
ening, because she had not taken wings and flown across the 
Alps. "Why do you not come to me?" the bridegroom de- 
manded. " If it is a lover that detains you, beware of Othello 's 
dagger!" 



50 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

This outburst of the twenty-six-year-old Corsican amused 
the thirty-two-year-old Creole immensely, and she read the 
passage to the poet Arnault — she delighted to show Napoleon's 
love letters — and Arnault said in his old age: "I seem to 
hear her once more say, with her Creole accent, while she 
smiles, ' How funny Bonaparte is. ' " 

Sardinia pledged herself to forsake the alliance with Austria 
and to disperse her army, and she ceded Savoy and Nice to 
France outright. Napoleon loudly insisted on stipulating also 
that in pursuit of the Austrians he should be permitted to 
cross the River Po at a certain point. Beaulieu, of course, 
heard of this just as he had heard of the demand on Genoa 
for a free road through the easterly pass and he rose to the 
bait with the same eagerness, while Napoleon marched his 
army 100 miles down stream and crossed where there were 
only 200 or 300 Austrians to be frightened off the scene. He 
was not only over the river, but getting in behind the enemy, 
who hurriedly fell back. 

From the Po, he pressed on to the Adda and its now cele- 
brated bridge at Lodi. This little city which lies twenty miles 
from Milan seems little changed by time. There is only a 
picturesque vestige of the old town wall with its mossy bricks 
and the grass growing on its top. But even when this barrier 
stood intact, it did not prove a serious obstacle to the French, 
who fairly took the town with their bare hands, the rear guard 
of the Austrians fleeing out the other side by the bridge over 
the Adda. 

On the narrow but pleasant and clean main street of the 
village, which now has a population of 20,000, still stands the 
big old Pitletti palace where Napoleon made his headquarters. 
The historic bridge, however, has been replaced by a somewhat 
wider structure, 300 or 400 feet long, but a tablet on a wall 
near by records the deed which immortalised its name. The 
Austrians intended to destroy the bridge after crossing the 
river, but the French were so close on their heels that they 
could only turn and resist with their artillery the passage of 
their pursuers. 

The clock tower of the church of the Magdalena rises by 



THE LITTLE CORPORAL 51 

the river side unchanged since Napoleon climbed to its top and 
looked across the shallow stream which dribbled between him 
and the Austrians that May afternoon. While he stood in the 
tower, watching the futile cannonading between his own forces 
and the enemy, the clock clanged five, again it sounded six, and 
then he determined to take the bridge by storm. 

The grenadiers, with shouts of ' ' Vive la Republique, ' ' dashed 
upon it behind a battalion of carbineers and into a hail of 
grape and canister from the Austrian guns. The carbineers 
fell in heaps, and the grenadiers paused before this ghastly 
barricade. While they hesitated, several officers, Lannes, first 
of all, and then Massena, Berthier, Cervoni and others with 
waving swords, rushed by them, leaped over the stricken car- 
bineers, and led the grenadiers into the very mouths of the 
Austrian guns. The gunners were bayoneted, every gun was 
captured and the enemy put to flight. 

It was in the twilight when Napoleon rode out of the town 
to visit the camp of his army. Dismounting, he sauntered up 
to a group of captured officers. They did not recognise the 
young French officer, who asked them how their army was get- 
ting along. An Austrian captain replied, "Not very well. 
But then this young general of yours is violating every rule 
of military operations. We never know where to find him. 
Sometimes he is in front of us, sometimes in our rear and 
again on our flank. We can't tell how to place ourselves. 
This way of making war is outrageous. ' ' 

Napoleon passed on from the prisoners to his grenadiers, 
who cheered him fervently. Plainly he had touched their 
imagination when he hurled them upon the smoking cannon 
of the foe. They had promptly held a council, as they were 
in the habit of doing when anything was happening, and they 
decided to promote him. Wherefore they acclaimed him now 
by the new title which they had admiringly conferred upon 
him, "The Little Corporal!'' 



CHAPTER VII 
IN THE COCKPIT OF EUROPE 

1796 AGE 26-27 

WHEN the passenger on the train from Milan to 
Venice has looked out for an hour or more upon a 
quiet and fruitful plain, where the stately poplars 
of Lombardy stretch skyward to rival the noble bell towers 
of the village churches, he sees the landscape abruptly change 
from smiling peace to frowning war. Ugly wrinkles suddenly 
disfigure the face of the countryside where many redoubts 
furrow the earth, and grey, moated forts and battlemented 
citadels lift their scowling fronts on every hand. One long 
chain of fortifications stretches seventy-five miles to Legnano 
and southward twenty-five miles from Verona and Lonato to 
the mouldy walls of Mantua. Within that roped arena lies 
the great battleground of Italy, which Freeman christened 
"the cockpit of Europe." 

When he had dashed across the bridge of Lodi in May, 1796, 
Napoleon stood in that cockpit, and there he cast his gauntlet 
at the feet of Austria on the Lombardy plain. Fooling his 
ever gullible foe, he passed over the Mincio as he had crossed 
the Po and the Alps, by making a pretended movement in 
almost the opposite direction to his real line of advance. 

Beaulieu's resistance thus was brought to an end, and the 
young chieftain entered upon the siege of Mantua with its 
garrison of 13,000 or 15,000 Austrians. This was an irksome 
task for his impetuous nature. ' ' The success of a siege, ' ' he 
scornfully remarked, "depends upon nothing but luck, a dog 
or a goose. ' ' Leaving a patient watch dog among the generals 
to sit down in front of Mantua, his restless spirit turned to 
the more congenial work of preparing to meet a new army 
which Austria was hastily organising to send against his 
wearied troops. 

52 



IN THE COCKPIT OF EUROPE 53 

Between the Austrian frontier and Mantua there stretched 
in those days the territory of the old republic of Venice. 
Across that supposedly neutral ground Austria had a right of 
way into Lombardy, but Napoleon had none into Austria. She 
was free to descend upon him unmolested, but he must not go 
forth to meet her. 

Catching some Austrians straying off their prescribed path 
through Venetia, however, he ignored the jug-handled neu- 
trality of Venice and soon both armies overran the land of the 
Doges. Seizing the Venetian city of Verona, which is seated 
on both banks of the Adige, he held the key to the Austrian 
Tyrol and, spreading his army along the shapely foot of lovely 
Lake Garda, he reported to the Directory, ' ' Our outposts are 
on the hills of Germany." For the Austrian ruler was the 
German Emperor in those days and Austria was the head of 
the German world. 

Meanwhile Napoleon brought the King of Naples to sue for 
peace, sent an expedition to seize vast stores in the port of 
Leghorn belonging to English merchants, captured Bologna, 
Ferrara and Urbino in the Papal States, and made a truce 
with the Pope ; ran off to Pavia, where he converted the castle 
of that town into a factory for the making of 2000 hospital 
beds, and to Tortona, where he assembled all manner of muni- 
tions for his campaign. 

As he was dressing one morning at Tortona he broke the 
glass over the miniature of Josephine, which he had car- 
ried in his bosom all the way from Paris. His yellow counte- 
nance blanched with fear. ' ' My wife is ill ! " he cried out to 
Marmont; ''or," the jealous Corsican lover darkly added, 
"she is unfaithful." He sat down at once and wrote: 

You know that I could never endure to see you in love with any 
one, still less endure that you should have a lover; to tear out his 
heart and to see him would be one and the same thing, and then, if 
I could raise my hand against your sacred person — No ! I should 
never dare, but I should at once abandon a life in which the most 
virtuous being in the world had deceived me. ... A thousand kisses 
on your eyes, your lips ! 

Even a more passionate love and a more heroic nature than 



54 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

the Creole bride's might have hesitated to obey his summons 
while Napoleon's headquarters were in the saddle. Now that 
he held Milan and had a roof to offer her, she left Paris at 
his bidding, but full of tearful regret for the festive scenes in 
which she had been the central figure. Arriving in Milan with 
Joseph Bonaparte, Colonel Junot — and her dog Fortune — 
there was another two-day honeymoon in the Serbelloni pal- 
ace, and then the soldier bridegroom was off to the war 
again. 

Napoleon was now in a desperate situation. Fifty thousand 
Austrians bore down apon him, where he stood between them 
and their big garrison in Mantua, and he was surrounded by 
hostile Italian states. To combat the foe in his front and rear, 
he had hardly more than 40,000 men, and many thousands of 
these were besieging the fortress. 

While waiting to grapple with the new Austrian army, 
under the command of Marshal Wurmser, he induced 
Josephine to come to Brescia, and she always boasted that it 
was her presence there and her intuition which saved her 
husband from falling into the hands of the stealthily advancing 
enemy. The governor at Brescia, with a show of cordial hos- 
pitality, proposed a great entertainment in her honour, but 
she suspected a trap and at her urgent suggestion, Napoleon 
left the threatened city to join his army, while she went to 
Salo, on Lake Garda, where, however, she found herself under 
fire from a flotilla. Leaping from her coach, she fled afoot 
until nearly exhausted, when she was picked up in a peasant's 
two-wheeled cart and conveyed to Castiglione, where she 
rushed weeping into the arms of her husband, who in a spirit 
of Corsican vengeance vowed, "The Austrians shall pay dear 
for those tears ! ' ' 

Josephine weeping was a spectacle Napoleon never could 
view unmoved. Often it was to leave him weak and irresolute. 
Now it set the youthful lover afire with an ambition to win 
another victory, to console and dazzle Josephine with a new 
triumph. 

For five August days, he did not take off his boots while 
he smashed right and left at two Austrian armies until he had 



IN THE COCKPIT OF EUROPE 55 

beaten and divided them. In the course of that running fight 
which bears the name of the Battle of Castiglione, he rode five 
horses to death and nearly fell a captive in the hands of the 
foe. Nothing but his audacity saved him. 

Twice in the course of that summer he was in imminent peril 
of being taken prisoner. He was far from well at the time. 
His health having been undermined by poverty in his youth 
and more lately by exposure in the earthworks at Toulon, he 
was still suffering from blood poisoning which he contracted 
by handling an infected artillery sponge in the siege of that 
city. Symptoms of tuberculosis also had developed. 

He hated the loathsome drugs in the pharmacopoeia of 
that day, and resisted them like a stubborn child. The 
only thing his physician could do to relieve his frightful 
headaches was to plunge him into a tub or barrel of hot 
water. 

As he had taken off a shoe, preparatory to undressing for 
such a bath in a palace near Verona, he was almost captured, 
but saved himself by fleeing through the garden of the palace 
with only one shoe on. That experience led him to form a 
body of Guides for his personal protection, a corps which even- 
tually developed into the famous Guard. Bessieres was their 
leader, and every man among them must have seen at least 
ten years of service. 

Another day neither the Guides nor flight and nothing but 
his own audacity could save him from falling into the hands 
of the enemy. The Austrians had been so confused by the 
blow they received in a battle at Lonato that 4000 of them 
wandered about the country in a body, without knowing which 
way to go. In their wandering they strayed back to the lost 
battlefield of the day before, where they stumbled upon and 
surrounded 1200 French. 

The officer demanding the surrender of this little force was 
blindfolded, as usual, before being conducted to headquarters 
with his flag of truce. There Napoleon had quickly mounted 
his staff and drawn his Guides around him in an imposing 
array. When the bandage was removed, the eyes of the Aus- 
trian opened wide with amazement as he found himself lief ore 



56 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

the General-in-chief of the French, who, having put on his 
most terrifying expression, addressed the messenger in an 
indignant tone : 

"What means this insult? Have you the insolence to bring 
a summons of surrender to me in the middle of my army? 
Say to those who sent you that unless they lay down their 
arms within eight minutes, every man of them shall be shot." 
And it did not take eight minutes for the 4000 to surrender 
to the 1200 ! 

It is strange that it should have been among the very hills 
where Napoleon won the victory of Castiglione, that Victor 
Emmanuel and Napoleon III fought the Battle of Solferino 
sixty-three years afterward when Austria was driven out of 
Lombardy forever. The tall tower of San Martino commemo- 
rates that triumph, and on its inner walls are inscribed, in 
bronze, the names of no less than 650,000 Italians who took 
part in the wars for the liberation of Italy. 

Marshal Wurmser, defeated at Castiglione, retired to the 
mountains of Tyrol but only long enough to reinforce his 
shattered army. Again, however, he divided his force, which 
numbered 45,000, and in September he moved southward in 
two columns. As he advanced, Napoleon went to meet him 
and the clash came in the narrow Tyrolean passes. At the end 
of a swift, hot campaign, the Austrians, with only a fourth 
of their original strength, made their way down into Italy 
and Wurmser hastened to shut himself up in the fortress of 
Mantua. 

Another army of 50,000 was gathered by Austria the next 
month and placed under the command of General Alvinzi. 
He, too, divided his forces, but the little band of French was 
so reduced by this time that Napoleon could not show a supe- 
riority of numbers at any point. 

With his small, worn-out army, he met Alvinzi in Novem- 
ber at Caldiero where the mountains of Venetia come down 
to the plain. It is a beautiful and fruitful land, the grape- 
vines stretching in garlands from tree to tree in the orchards. 
This affords a pretty decorative effect for tourist eyes, but the 
Austrian and French scouts failed to enjoy it because those 



IN THE COCKPIT OF EUROPE 57 

festoons broke the view and baffled them in their work of 
watching the movements of troops. 

Napoleon lost at Caldiero the opening fight in that autumnal 
campaign of 1796. There, for the first time, he left the enemy 
on a field of battle. Prudence dictated his retirement toward 
the Adda. But courage counselled a bolder stroke. The 
night he moved in silence out of Verona, the crestfallen troops 
felt they were in retreat until by a sudden turn they found 
themselves marching along the River Adige. Their com- 
mander had determined to stake everything on an effort to 
get around Alvinzi and cut his communications. 

And he chose one of the strangest battlefields in the geog- 
raphy of warfare. Where the little River Alpone flows down 
to join the Adige, near the village of Ronco, there is a big 
marsh lying between the two streams, across which there are 
only two diked causeways, and an army cannot move except 
by those roads. 

When Napoleon came down from Verona, he put that marsh 
between him and Alvinzi, where the enemy would lose the 
advantage of greater numbers, for no more Austrians than 
Frenchmen could advance abreast on those two narrow roads. 
It was a clever choice of ground, and the only means of avert- 
ing a disaster. 

The French marched out of Ronco by both causeways, but 
to accomplish their main purpose and get in the rear of the 
Austrians they struggled for three days to cross the fifty-foot 
bridge over the Alpone. At one end of the famous little 
bridge to-day sits the village of Arcole, several miles from a 
railroad or even a highroad. From the other end stretches 
the marsh, which is now drained and converted into well- 
tended fields as level as the prairie farms in the Mississippi 
Valley. Off across the fields rises the church tower of Ronco, 
from which Napoleon saw the enemy holding the bridge, while 
the crags of the bordering mountains on the north stick out 
as sharp as the barbs on a wire fence. It was through those 
rough passes that the Austrian monarch poured the blood of 
Austria and Hungary in torrents to ransom his rich Italian 
province from the French. 



58 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

On the little Arcole bridge the two great nations of conti- 
nental Europe fought for three days like dogs over a bone. 
It is as rude a structure as that which arched the flood, where, 
their flag to April's breeze unfurled, the embattled farmers 
stood and fired the shot heard round the world. 

By Concord bridge a people passed to independence and 
greatness. By Arcole bridge Italy, too, passed to independ- 
ence, but, alas, she had many more rivers still to cross. 

High banks had been thrown up along the Alpone to con- 
fine its waters and the road reaches the bridge at either end 
by a steep grade. The French officers rushed to the head of 
their column when it wavered before a detachment of Aus- 
trian troops who defended the bridge. They hoped to repeat 
the dash at Lodi. But their show of bravery was lost and 
Lannes and several other generals were wounded. Augureau, 
seizing a flag, leaped upon the bridge and taunted his men 
as they bent under the storm of the enemy's guns, "Cowards, 
do you fear death too much?" Alas, they loved life too well. 

Then Napoleon himself took the lead, while Lannes, for- 
getting his wounds, rose from his hospital cot to follow him. 
The little General sprang upon the bridge, where he was 
caught in a furious swirl of fighting French and Croats. 
Brave Muiron threw himself before him to cover him with 
his body and was struck dead at the feet of his chief. 

The bridge could not be taken by storm. The General-in- 
chief was whirled back with his men and pushed off the steep 
grade of the road into what was then a quagmire. The Little 
Corporal literally was stuck in the mud, close by where a 
stone shaft, a piece of graveyard art, now commemorates his 
desperate battle for the bridge. Marmont and Louis Bona- 
parte were foremost among those who ran to his assistance 
and rescued him from the enemy. Lannes was wounded again 
and Napoleon lamented all his life the death of the devoted 
Muiron. 

The third day of hard fighting about Arcole was drawing 
to a close with both armies unnerved and sick of battle, each 
only waiting for the other to quit from exhaustion. Then 
Napoleon, who had been unable to win with blood and powder, 



IN THE COCKPIT OF EUROPE 59 

gained the victory by an absurd ruse. Placing trumpets in 
the hands of twenty-five horsemen he sent them across the 
river farther down and they galloped around behind Arcole 
in the waning of the November day. 

The noise of the trumpets struck terror to the fainting 
hearts of the Austrians. At the thought of their left wing 
and rear being ambushed by what they imagined must be a 
column of cavalry, their last drop of courage left them, and 
soon Alvinzi's entire army was in full retreat on the moun- 
tains. Italy had been saved by the blare of twenty-five 
trumpets. 

"One must make for the flying foe," Napoleon said, "a 
bridge of gold or oppose to him a barrier of steel." He 
gladly gave the fleeing Alvinzi a golden bridge, while he him- 
self flew to Milan on the wings of love and burst open Jo- 
sephine's door only to find she had gone on a merry excursion 
to Genoa. 

Sitting down in the lonely palace he wrote her as if his 
heart were breaking. From a series of chiding and despair- 
ing letters written by him in that period, these sentences are 
taken : 

I had left all to see you, to press you to my heart — you were not 
here. . . . For me, to love you alone, to make you happy, to do noth- 
ing: that can annoy you, that is the lot and aim of my life. . . . 
When I ask you for a love like mine, I am wrong; why expect lace 
to weigh as much as gold? . . . Il is my misfortune that nature has 
denied me qualities that might fascinate you. ... I open my letter 
to send you a kiss. Ah, Josephine, Josephine! 



CHAPTER VIII 
CONQUERING AUSTRIA 

1797 AGE 27 

WHEN Napoleon had driven the Austrians off the 
Lombardy plain four times, another army of 
40,000 white coats, under General Alvinzi, started 
down the denies of the Tyrol in the depth of the winter of 
1796-7. 

Napoleon was in doubt where to find and meet the main 
column of the enemy until late of a January night when he 
divined that Alvinzi 's own command was headed straight for 
Verona along the banks of the Adige. Ordering reinforce- 
ments to follow him at full speed he raced to Rivoli, seventeen 
miles north, where 10,000 French were recoiling in the pres- 
ence of 28,000 Austrians. Fairly flying on his horse through 
a cold, white night he arrived at the French position at four 
o'clock in the morning and with his cheering assurance that 
13,000 men were coming to the support of the sorely beset 
10,000, he was just in time to avert a retreat. 

The battlefield of Rivoli is a classic in military topography. 
It is a broad, fairly level plateau, with mountains rising be- 
fore and behind it; the Adige rushes along one side, and a 
range of hills on the west runs down to Lake Garda, six miles 
away. 

On that drill ground Napoleon found the French en- 
camped. Off toward Monte Baldo, on whose snows the moon 
glistened, he saw the wide-flung line of camp fires of the sleep- 
ing Austrians. "The air was aflame with them," he said. 
But the enemy to gain a footing on the plateau must climb 
up steep, crooked and icy roads, and those zigzag paths were 
to determine the result of the battle. 

Without waiting for the Austrians to open the attack or for 

60 



CONQUERING AUSTRIA 61 

the French reinforcements to arrive, Napoleon at once took 
the aggressive. In the earlier hours that followed the sun- 
rise, the Austrians drove in their foes at every point of con- 
tact and threatened to catch them in the rear as well as to 
climb up on the plateau and break through their front. 

Napoleon sat on his horse as calmly as at a review while 
his lines wavered and with anxious eyes his generals watched 
his face. He was only waiting for the Austrians in front to 
climb up and show their white coats above the edge of the 
plateau, for his artillery to catch them on either side while 
his infantry dashed at the head of their column and tumbled 
them down the slope. As for the white coats in his rear 
they, too, were just where he wanted them, ready to be caught 
in their own rear by the French reinforcements coming up 
from Verona. 

When he heard the gloating shouts of the Austrians behind 
him, where they fondly believed they had him and his army 
enclosed within a wall of steel, he chuckled softly, "Now we 
have them!" Every man of that flanking column was cap- 
tured, while the artillery smashed and the cavalry dashed to 
pieces the columns that scrambled up the northern steeps of 
the heights of Rivoli. 

Alvinzi took flight from the scene with much less than half 
the men he had led down from Trent. Napoleon, in less 
than ten months, had vanquished the fifth army which Aus- 
tria had sent against him. 

Like a circus showing in one-day towns, the main body of 
the French broke camp as soon as the battle was won. Not 
long after midnight they were on the march southward, to 
prevent the Austrian division, which had moved down the 
other side of Lake Garda, from relieving Mantua. The re- 
inforcements at Rivoli had marched fourteen miles the night 
before the battle. After fighting all day they were now on 
a thirty-mile march toward Mantua, most of them without 
lying down. They arrived on the new field of conflict in 
time not only to avert the junction of the marching Austrians 
with the Mantuan garrison, but to catch all of the 9000 of 
them in a net. 



62 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Mantua was tottering to its fall. The men hemmed within 
its walls could no longer receive even their half rations of 
salted horse meat. Disease as well as famine threatened their 
extermination. One night in early February, Wurmser sent 
an officer to the tent of Gen. Seurrier, the commander of the 
besieging force, to find out what kind of bargain could be 
made. The messenger boasted, as usual, of the strength and 
endurance left in the garrison, and of its rich stores, sufficient 
bountifully to supply the men for three months more. 

He had no thought that the young French officer who, 
wrapped in his cloak, was sitting in a dark corner of the tent, 
scribbling on a sheet of paper, was the famous General-in- 
chief. At last the little man in the cloak ceased his scribbling 
and, walking to the table, threw the paper upon it. 

"There," said Napoleon, "are the conditions which I will 
grant. If your marshal had provisions only for three weeks 
and talked of surrender he would deserve my contempt. I 
know the extremities to which he is reduced, and I respect 
his valour, his misfortune, and his age. Whether he sur- 
renders to-morrow, in a month, or in three months, he shall 
have neither better nor harder conditions. He may stay as 
long as his sense of honour prompts him to hold out." 

When the Austrian army hobbled out of the Verona gate of 
Mantua the next morning, expecting to see their venerable 
commander humbled before his youthful conqueror, Napo- 
leon had left the scene, and the a^ed Wurmser was spared 
that humiliation. The 30,000 French now had 40,000 cap- 
tives to their credit within less than a month. 

When not an Austrian remained in arms on Italian soil, 
Napoleon at last received reinforcements from the Directory 
and the spring found him with 80,000 men under his com- 
mand. Taking half of that force with him, he set out in 
March on the road to Vienna, where, by threatening the Aus- 
trian capital, he hoped to bring the Emperor to terms of 
peace. But Austria, victorious against the Army of the 
Rhine, if so often overwhelmed by the Army of Italy, called 
the young, royal commander, the Archduke Charles, from his 
field of victory in the west to try his lance with the young 




The Little Corporal at the Bridge of Lodi 




— . u^iMdA 



Wini Josephine at a Fete in Milan 



CONQUERING AUSTRIA 63 

republican commander and save the capital of the Haps- 
burgs. Age had not proved to be a match for youth. Beau- 
lieu was seventy-one and Wurmser seventy-nine. But Charles 
was even younger than Napoleon, only twenty-five, and the 
new campaign was to be a competition between generals who 
had no more than entered manhood. 

It is 530 miles, as the railroad runs, from Verona to Vienna. 
But there were no Vienna expresses, no trains de luxe for 
Napoleon through the wildly picturesque passages of the 
Eastern Alps. Part of the way over which he led his troops, 
with their cannon and supplies, was no more than a mule 
track, where a cart never had been. They climbed and 
stumbled and pulled and hauled up the sleety mountain sides. 
They laboured over the heights through three feet of snow, 
where there was not a guiding footprint before them. They 
waded and leaped the torrents in the valleys. 

The French came upon the Austrians in the Tyrol, but the 
Archduke Charles, longing for reinforcements, refused to 
make a stand, and fell back from height to height, Napo- 
leon giving him no resting time. At Tarvis, Charles turned 
in earnest for the first time and faced his relentless pur- 
suer. 

Tarvis sits on the summit of the Noric Alps at the head of 
a valley where a bronze soldier stands to-day on the brow of 
a cliff, a feather in his Austrian hat and a gun in his hand. 
This statue does not commemorate an Austrian victory in 
the campaign of 1797, however, but in another and later 
struggle with France twelve years afterward. For Tarvis, 
in spite of its commanding position, could not check Napo- 
leon's advance. The pass here is at its deepest and narrow- 
est measure, with barely room for the swift flowing, silvery 
Kanal and the highroad beside it. 

Through all the beautiful valley above Tarvis, the people 
have taken flight from savage man to savage nature on the 
mountain sides and even on the mountain tops, where on 
seemingly inaccessible crags of the jagged Alpine heights they 
have pitched their towns. An army must have to crowd 
closely together to keep from rubbing against the stony walls 



64 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

that shut in the path. And at every angle there is an old 
castle to threaten the invader of those wild fastnesses. 

The retreating Austrians were speedily melting away un- 
der the hot onslaughts of Napoleon and he found the road 
strewn with their sick and wounded, whom they abandoned 
in their flight to the mercies of the elements and the foe. De- 
scending into the valley of the Drave, he sent on ahead from 
Klagenfurt to the Archduke an appeal for peace, saying : 

Brave soldiers make war and desire peace. Has not this one lasted 
six years'? Have we not killed enough men and inflicted enough 
evils on sorrowing humanity? 

Even a prince of the oldest royal house of Europe could 
not take exception to the lofty tone of that communication 
from the Corsican republican. Charles returned a courte- 
ous reply and referred the letter to his brother, the Emperor, 
who, himself, was already fleeing from the oncoming foe. 
The imperial family abandoned their palaces in Vienna and 
abandoned their capital in terror at the approach of the re- 
publican hosts. Among the fugitives, running away from 
Napoleon, the ogre of every royal house, was a six-year-old 
princess, the Archduchess Marie Louise! 

After more Austrian defeats and when the French were at 
Leoben, only 117 miles from Vienna, as the railroad now 
runs, and more than 400 miles from the starting point of 
their campaign just four weeks before, Austria cried enough 
and laid down her arms. 

Her envoys came to Leoben, in its pretty vale, and choos- 
ing a garden as neutral ground, they met the conqueror there 
in a summer house. As they started to write in the pre- 
amble of the armistice the statement that the Emperor of 
Germany recognised the French Republic, Napoleon com- 
manded, ' ' Strike that out ; the Republic is like the sun ; none 
but the blind can fail to recognise it." 



CHAPTER IX 

NATIONS AT THE FEET OF A YOUTH 

1796-1797 AGE 26-27 

MILAN was Napoleon's first capital, his training school 
in the trade of empire. From the fields of his mili- 
tary victories, where he vanquished four Austrian 
generals and five Austrian armies, winning his way in a year 
twice across the Alps and from the shores of the Mediter- 
ranean to the valley of the Danube, he dashed into the city 
between battles to negotiate treaties and create states. 

Across the square from the famous cathedral stand the 
walls of the first royal palace in which he ever slept. It is 
a big, sprawling, dreary pile which cumbers an acre or so of 
earth and which in silent gloom remains untenanted now- 
adays except for a rare visit from the King of Italy or some 
member of the reigning family. 

When Napoleon first entered Milan in his brand-new glory 
after the dash across the bridge of Lodi in May, 1796, he 
strode into this palace as the Austrian Archduke fled out 
the back door. Climbing into the viceregal bed of a Haps- 
burg prince, he who had never known a roof of his own must 
have proudly contrasted his new lodgings with his $2 a month 
den at Mile. Bou's in Valence only four years before. 

The people, however, did not think this abiding place of the 
Visconti, the Sforzas and the Spanish and Austrian viceroys, 
this home of despotism for 600 years, was a suitable dwelling 
for their republican liberator, the young scourge of tyrants. 
When he came again a patriotic aristocrat invited him to ac- 
cept his house and he went to live in the Serbelloni palace — 
on the Corso Venezia, a few squares behind the cathedral. 

65 



66 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The Serbelloni is far more beautiful than the royal palace 
and probably the most beautiful of all the palaces of Milan. 
The passerby on the street car may see only its severe ex- 
terior, with the marble tablet commemorating Napoleon's 
tenancy, and might not suspect its inner beauties, its great 
columns and noble courtyard, its royal halls adorned by the 
brushes of Titian, Velasquez, Salvator Rosa and other masters. 

There in the Serbelloni, Josephine was installed by Na- 
poleon when she came on from Paris and it was their honey- 
moon nest. There they served their apprenticeship in the 
art of reigning, requiring neither a royal palace nor a royal 
crown for their rehearsal. 

Napoleon, indeed, hardly needed to study the part. Na- 
ture seems to have cast him for it. In the obscurity and 
poverty of his youth there was something imperial in his bear- 
ing and temper, something that marked him apart and held 
him aloof from his fellows. The world only called him queer 
then, but the instant he gained power it acclaimed him great. 

The transition came in a day. Veteran generals of the 
Army of Italy were transformed at once from his critics into 
his courtiers and he had no more than sat down in Milan 
than a court spontaneously formed around him. While the 
populace stood by the hour on the Corso Venezia waiting to 
catch a glimpse of him as he entered or left the palace, his 
officers and the members of the Milanese aristocracy sat in 
the grand drawing room with their eyes on the big folding 
doors, watching for them to swing wide and for him to appear 
before them. The moment they saw him, every one of them, 
men and women alike, French republicans equally with 
Italian aristocrats, sprang to their feet and bowed in silent 
homage beneath the eagle-like glance of his deep-set grey eyes. 

As yet his eyes were almost the only feature that men re- 
marked in the personal presence of this little, long-haired, 
pinched face General-in-chief. His lean, frail, girlish figure 
might have been that of a poet starving for a publisher. His 
stooping, almost round shoulders and pallid countenance sug- 
gested the study room of a scholar rather than the camp of a 
conqueror. 



NATIONS AT THE FEET OF A YOUTH 67 

Success and glory had yet found no reflection in his visage 
and it was still as sorrowful as when it bent over the plate of 
a six-sou dinner in a cheap restaurant of Paris or in suicidal 
meditation gazed longingly upon the Rhone at Valence. The 
one soldierly thing about his appearance was his uniform and 
that was as plain as the army regulations permitted. 

The artist Gros has described, but should have painted, a 
pretty scene at the Serbelloni when he came from Paris to 
paint his celebrated picture of Napoleon on the bridge of 
Arcole. Never finding his subject at rest long enough to en- 
able him to start the picture, the only sittings he obtained 
were directly after breakfast when, for his benefit, Josephine 
sometimes obligingly held the Little Corporal on her knee. 

Out on the old Como road, only a few miles from Milan, 
stands another monument of Napoleon's Italian reign in the 
melancholy form of a lunatic asylum. This bedlam once was 
the lovely villa of Montebello, and the walls that now echo 
back the chatter of a colony of poor, demented creatures re- 
sounded in other days with the mirth of youth rejoicing in 
the first harvest of its ambition. 

In his second and last summer in Italy, after the armistice 
with Austria, Napoleon left the heat of the city, for Milan 
is one of the hottest places in Italy, and took up his residence 
at this villa, which time has changed beyond recognition. It 
was then a great country palace, sitting far back from the 
highroad in a large park, with cool, shady avenues, pretty 
fountains, ingenious grottoes, and all the exquisite loveliness 
of an Italian retreat. Two flights of steps led up to the broad, 
high terrace that ran along the front and sides of the villa 
from which the Alps could be seen on the one hand and the 
lace-like turrets of the Milan cathedral on the other. 

In that sylvan refuge the young arbiter of nations gath- 
ered about him the families of his military and civil officers, 
and thither the envoys of suppliant states followed him. 
There, too, with a Corsican loyalty to the ties of blood, he 
assembled most of his family and was reunited with them for 
the first time since the flight of the Bonapartes from Corsica. 

A picturesque guard of 300 Polish soldiers was stationed 



68 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

in the park and the band of the Guides played for dinner, 
where like a Bourbon monarch, apart from his courtiers, Na- 
poleon ate, while a mob of privileged persons stood and 
watched the eagle feed, their awed gaze disconcerting him 
no more than if he had been born and bred at Versailles. 

As the company sipped its after-dinner coffee on the ter- 
race, Mme. Leopold Berthier, wife of the younger brother of 
the chief of staff, sang in the drawing room, or there floated 
out the deeper-toned melody of General Kilmaine, the brave 
Dublin man and veteran of the American Revolution, who 
delighted in singing the airs of Erin. Another man of Irish 
blood but of French birth, General Clarke, was the favourite 
story teller of the terrace. 

But when the circle had gone indoors and left the outer 
air to the fireflies, Napoleon himself sometimes practised his 
dramatic gifts. As he enacted a Corsican ghost story, with 
only a candle or two to light up his face, the women rewarded 
his efforts with screams of horror. 

The court of Montebello were a merry lot, hardly more than 
boys and girls and giddy with their sudden rise from poverty 
and obscurity. If they could have foretold the strange for- 
tunes that awaited them, if they had prophetically anticipated 
the future by ten years and hailed one another as emperor and 
empress, kings and queens, princes and princesses, dukes and 
duchesses, counts and countesses they would have seemed more 
mad than their present unfortunate successors, the insane in- 
mates of Montebello. 

Napoleon had taken care to share his prosperity with his 
family at each upward step in his swiftly changing fortunes. 
Nearly all the $10,000 that the Directory voted him for put- 
ting down the revolt in the streets of Paris went at once to 
his impoverished mother, who had seen with dismay her 
daughters growing up wild and neglected in patched shoes 
and clothes, robbing orchards like tomboys and flirting with 
gallant Frenchmen in the streets of Marseilles. 

With their changing lot in life the Bonapartes changed 
their names, dropping their Corsican nomenclature for more 
French-sounding prenomen. The mother, Letizia, was Latin- 



NATIONS AT THE FEET OF A YOUTH 69 

ized into Letitia, Guisseppi became Joseph; Luciano became 
Lucien, although for a while he adopted the name of Brutus; 
Luigi was made over into Louis. 

In her devoutness Letitia had christened all the girls for 
the Virgin, but now Maria Annunziata was transformed into 
Caroline, Maria Anna into Elisa, and Maria Paoletta into 
Pauline. Napoleon disliked his own name as too foreign in 
France but fame overtook it and glorified it before he could 
change it. He dropped the u from Buonaparte, however, 
when he took command of the Army of Italy, and Gallicized 
the pronunciation by silencing the final e. 

Napoleon at twenty-six and twenty-seven not only found 
himself with a court, but in the full exercise of nearly all the 
powers of an absolute sovereign. Under his multitude of 
cares, he sent for Bourrienne, his old schoolmate of Brienne 
and companion of his poverty in Paris. The new secretary 
found his desk buried in neglected letters, but Napoleon told 
him to open only those that came by special couriers and pitch 
all the rest in a basket for three weeks. It was discovered then 
that time had answered four-fifths of them, and the inventor 
of this labour-saving device laughed heartily over its success. 

A man must be more than warrior to win the highest fame. 
The sword was but a single tool in the kit of Alexander and 
Caesar, Charlemagne and Napoleon. 

The combination is always and everywhere irresistible. 
Happily the American Revolution found it in Washington, 
and happily the American Civil War did not find it in any 
of its generals. 

As soon as Napoleon arrived in Italy he proceeded to act 
as soldier, diplomat and law giver. He found nearly 20,- 
000,000 Italians separated into a dozen nationalities, and half 
of them under alien conquerors. Patriotism was only a 
dream, and the dreamers were in prison or exile. Napoleon 
aroused this long repressed passion, and with a large and 
generous vision, disregarding and defying his government, he 
laid the corner stone of united Italy. In one short, crowded 
year the peninsula was revolutionised and republicanised 
from the summit of the Alps to the summit of the Apennines 



70 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

with only the kingdom of Sardinia and the duchy of Parma 
standing as the spared monuments of the old order of things. 

Everywhere Napoleon was the Republic. He convoked 
the Italians in a great assembly for the first time. He 
brought the best minds and spirits of Italy into the govern- 
ment, recalling many exiles to share in the upbuilding of a 
nation, the Cisalpine Republic. But he himself was the law- 
giver, and constitutions were drafted under his eyes. 

In all his pulling down of thrones, there was one that the 
young conqueror shrank from laying hands on, the venerable 
throne of Peter. He invaded and dismembered the Papal 
States, but, although continually urged by the Directors to 
seize Rome, he spared the eternal city and scrupulously re- 
frained from stepping foot in it. 

No such compunction as the Holy See inspired in him, re- 
strained him in dealing with Venice, which, notwithstand- 
ing the virtuous outcry of many historians, was perhaps the 
least deserving state in all Italy. The Venetian territory lay 
between the French and the Austrian frontier, and its rulers 
did not sufficiently conceal their hostility to France. 

At last, while Napoleon was away on his campaign in Aus- 
tria, a bloody massacre of the French, which did not spare 
even the sick in the hospitals of Verona, took place on Vene- 
tian territory, and the fate of Venice was sealed. "I will 
be an Attila to you," he stormed at the Doge; "the lion of 
St, Mark must bite the dust." Thus a despotism of a thou- 
sand years fell with as sudden a crash as we have seen its 
Campanile fall in our day. 

As Napoleon stirred the emotions of the Italians with hopes 
of national independence, he fired his army of French re- 
publicans with the zeal of liberators and made them "play 
and laugh with death," as he said, while they marched and 
battled for the liberation of men. It is true he no longer 
shared his soldiers' simple faith in the Republic. He had 
been behind the scenes in Paris and the illusions of his youth 
were gone. The nightmare of the Reign of Terror had re- 
placed the beautiful dreams of his barrack days and a gen- 
erous faith in humanity had withered into a bitter cynicism. 



NATIONS AT THE FEET OF A YOUTH 71 

Already he had made the fatal mistake of his career — he 
had mistaken for mankind the plotting politicians of the 
French capital. "What an idea," he exclaimed, "a republic 
of 30,000,000 men! Give the French people a rattle and 
they are satisfied." He held no higher opinions of the 
Italians: "Good God! There are 18,000,000 people in Italy 
and with difficulty I have found only two men." 

If, however, his republicanism was now only a pretence, 
he was still as true as any man in the ranks to what he re- 
garded as the great, original purpose of the Revolution. He 
had no use for the Bourbons. He was intensely loyal to the 
new France. Other commanders of the armies of the Re- 
public had sold out. But his sword was without price. 

Naples and Venice, Austria and the Bourbons offered him 
rich bribes in cash and honours. Money never is the tempter 
of the Alexanders and the Caesars, the Charlemagnes and the 
Napoleons. It cannot buy what they want. Great ambitions 
can have no alloy of avarice. The eagle cannot soar with 
bags of gold tied to its feet. 

Napoleon appears to have kept his hands clean while the 
foremost savants of France were joying in the robbery of 
the galleries, and her naturalists ravaged the gardens and 
museums of Italy. The Romans never exulted more proudly 
or loudly at the triumph of a returning conqueror in his 
chariot with his long procession of human spoils than the 
Parisians as they watched the parade of carts piled high with 
the looted art of Italy on its way to the Louvre. 

The coming of Raphael's Transfiguration, of the Apollo 
Belvidere, of the Capitoline Gladiator, of the Laocoon, of the 
bronze horses of Venice and the winged lion of St. Mark, of 
the immortal creations of Titian, Correggio and the rest of the 
old masters symbolised to the popular imagination better 
than any other trophies the flattering thought that Paris was 
mistress of the world and that France had succeeded to the 
grandeur that was Rome. 

Napoleon's final achievement in Italy was the negotiation 
of a treaty of peace with Austria, a power that had relent- 
lessly fought the Republic from its birth. In this work he 



72 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

confidently matched himself alone against Count Cobentzl, 
one of the most renowned diplomats of Europe, supported 
by a distinguished staff of Austrian experts. 

Going with Josephine into the Friuli above Venice, in Octo- 
ber 1797, they settled down at Passeriano, in the country villa 
of the overthrown Doge of Venice, while the Austrian nego- 
tiators established themselves in the neighbouring town of 
Udine. The veteran and eminent diplomat met the young 
soldier with an easy air of familiar badinage, but Napoleon 
with one look established their relations on a different basis. 
Then the game began. 

History has a startling picture of him seizing from a table 
in Count Cobentzl 's quarters a rare and costly vase which 
Catherine of Russia had given to the Count, and lifting it 
above his face convulsed with rage dashing it in a hundred 
pieces on the floor as he roared : ' ' See ! So will I smash 
your monarchy before another month has passed." It is 
true that after a wild scene of some kind, he rushed out of 
the room, loudly shouting to his staff to notify the Archduke 
Charles that hostilities would be reopened in twenty-four 
hours. But the Austrians hurried after him and laid down 
their hand to the winner in the great poker game which both 
sides had been playing. 

As a consolation for her loss of Belgium and Lombardy, 
Austria accepted Venice and most of Venetia, including the 
Trentino and the Dalmatian coast, which never had belonged 
to her and which form the "Italia irridenta," the unre- 
deemed Italy for which Italians have sighed so long. The 
instrument was signed at Passeriano, but it was christened 
the Treaty of Campo Formio for a little village on the neu- 
tral ground lying between the houses of the two parties to 
the compact. 

The people of France welcomed the end of the more than 
five years' war with Austria, and the Peace of Campo 
Formio was hailed as the crowning victory of the Army of 
Italy, whose flag bore the boast of 150,000 prisoners and 610 
pieces of artillery captured in eighteen pitched battles and 
in three times as many minor engagements. 



CHAPTER X 

THE DESCENT UPON EGYPT 

1797-1798 AGE 28 

RETURNING to Paris after an absence of twenty 
months, Napoleon found himself the hero of a city 
whose streets in days not long before he had tramped 
hungry and out at the elbows. Only thirteen years had 
passed since he first shyly peeped at the great capital 
from behind the hooded and belted robe of the Minim friar 
of Brienne who had led him to the Ecole Militaire. It was 
only five years since he had come as a cashiered lieutenant 
to beg back his place in the arm}', and it was only two since 
the populace had fled from him as the unknown "man on 
horseback." Now his name was on the myriad lips of the 
city as they acclaimed him the deliverer of France and the 
pacifier of Europe, and his modest honeymoon street was re- 
christened the Rue de la Victoire. 

The applause of Paris disturbed him more than her neglect 
in the days of his poverty and obscurity. "Bah!" he said. 
"These people would crowd to see me just as hard if I were 
on my way to the guillotine. ' ' 

While the Republic now had conquered peace throughout 
the continent, it still was defied by the island kingdom of 
Great Britain, and the British navy continued to shut the 
gates of the sea against French commerce. The Directory, 
early in 1798, commissioned Napoleon General-in-chief of the 
Army of England, but in ordering him to strike Great Britain 
anywhere while she remained mistress of the seas, they were 
simply commanding him to make bricks without straw — and 
he chose to undertake that impossible task in the land of 
Joseph and Pharaoh. 

73 



74 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

As he had found Toulon at LaSeyne and as he had found 
Vienna at Mantua, he said now that London was not in Eng- 
land but in India. Rather than try to cross the twenty-five 
miles of channel crowded with British warships, he preferred 
to take his chances of dodging the enemy in a sail of 1400 
miles through the Mediterranean. Instead of a headlong 
lunge at England, he chose to "take her in the rear," by 
landing an army in Egypt, marching across Asia and seizing 
the British possessions in India, which the French imagined 
were the true source of Britain's wealth and power. 

Still styling himself the Commander-in-chief of the Army 
of England, although it had been privately rechristened the 
Army of the Orient, he hastily assembled his military and 
naval forces and a great fleet of transports in the Mediter- 
ranean at Toulon. While he advertised it as an expedition 
against the British, he kept its direction and destination a 
close secret among a very few. 

Nearly all the ships of the British navy were guarding the 
English coast and blockading the northern ports of France. 
There was not a warship of that power left in the Mediter- 
ranean until Nelson arrived off Toulon two days before the 
sailing time of the French fleet, but — and this is only the 
first line in a chapter of unfortunate accidents that were to 
befall him — he was blown away in a storm. 

Notwithstanding the secrecy in which Napoleon had en- 
veloped his purpose, all adventurous spirits were eager 
blindly to follow his star. Every bright and shining lance 
in the army was proffered him. He gathered besides a whole 
regiment of geographers and geometricians, astronomers and 
chemists, mineralogists and geologists, botanists and zoolo- 
gists, linguists and orientalists, architects and draftsmen, 
actors and singers, poets and chroniclers. 

For the third time in a little more than four years, Napo- 
leon thus found himself in Toulon ; in* the earliest instance 
as a penniless exile from Corsica, then as an artillery cap- 
tain at the siege of the town, and now as the General-in-chief 
of the first military expedition the west had ventured against 
the east in the 500 years since the failure of the Crusades. 



THE DESCENT UPON EGYPT 75 

His flagship, L' Orient, loaded down with 2000 passengers, 
freed herself with difficulty from the mud, and rounded the 
point of L'Eguillette, where the flowers of May were bloom- 
ing on the earthworks of the Fort of Men Without Fear. 
As she passed out into the great harbour he stood on deck with 
a spyglass to his eye, watching the fluttering handkerchief of 
Josephine, who leaned on the balcony rail of the port intend- 
ant's house, and continued to wave a farewell, not only to 
him but also to the manly youth by his side, her own spyglass 
dimmed with tears at her parting from her son as well as her 
husband. 

Out of Toulon streamed the mighty armada of France. 
When it was joined by reinforcements from other ports, it 
ploughed its way through the ivory-crested waves of the blue 
sea with the prows of thirteen ships of the fighting line, four- 
teen frigates, seventy-two corvettes and nearly 400 transport 
vessels, carrying 35,000 troops of the Kepublic, who no more 
knew where and why they were going than the weeds that 
danced in the wake of their boats on the bosom of the waters. 

No shadow of doubt crossed the mind of their General-in- 
chief as he strode the quarter deck of L 'Orient. At last he 
was on the high road to empire. Alexander and Hannibal, 
Pompey and Cassar, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Cartha- 
ginians, the Romans and the Saracens sailed the Mediter- 
ranean on their conquests of the earth, and Peter and Paul 
on their conquests of the soul. It was the theatre of the war 
of the Titans, where Jupiter won the sovereignty of the world 
and Neptune ruled the wave; where Hercules laboured and 
Jason cruised, Ulysses wandered and ^Eneas voyaged. 

For on the Mediterranean, mythology and history are as 
one and fables are facts and facts are fables. The gods are 
as real as men, and Homer and Herodotus, Virgil and Plu- 
tarch are equally historians. 

In this age of steam and the wireless Napoleon's expedition 
would be smashed and sunk in a week. Even in those days 
of sails and no telegraph it was only by the most incredible 
good luck that he and his big fleet floated safely over the 
Mediterranean for six weeks with the greatest of British sail- 



76 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

ors chasing back and forth and ransacking the sea to find 
him. 

Fortunately for him the enemy did not know where he was 
going or what course he was taking. "While Nelson was fly- 
ing up and down the European coast, on the assumption that 
the French were headed for Naples or Sicily, Napoleon was 
steering toward the African shore, passing outside of Corsica, 
Sardinia and Sicily and making for Malta, whose outlying 
island of Gazo rose to view after a sail of nearly three weeks. 

In the dusk of a June evening the French fleet came to 
anchor within a gunshot of the great grey heap of masonry 
which the Knights of St. John had piled up for the defence of 
Malta against the Turk. These last of the Crusaders, after 
having been driven from Jerusalem to the rock of Acre and 
from Acre to the Island of Rhodes, had found refuge from 
the Saracens behind the bastions of this barren island. 

From the battlements of St. Elmo the eight-pointed cross 
had waved defiance to the crescent in stubborn and disas- 
trous sieges. Challenged now by a nation of the west, which 
had torn down the crucifix from its churches and did not 
hold itself bound by the agreements of Christendom to re- 
spect this outpost of the Christian world, those soldiers of 
the Maltese cross, who had followed it for nearly 800 years, 
furled their banner before Napoleon and gave him the keys 
of Malta. 

As Napoleon sailed on from Malta and entered the Ionian 
Sea, Nelson raced in on the more northerly course. Both 
were now heading straight for Alexandria, for the Admiral 
at last had suspected that the French were going to Egypt. 
One day there was nothing but the horizon and sixty miles 
of water between them. That night, indeed under a moon- 
less sky, Nelson probably ran through the fleet without seeing 
it. With the impetuosity of despair, the Briton flew on the 
wind so fast that he sailed past the huge, slowgoing armada 
and hauled up at Alexandria. Next he raced off toward the 
Syrian coast on his wild hunt. 

As the English Admiral had been forty-eight hours too 
early for Napoleon at Toulon, he was again forty-eight hours 



THE DESCENT UPON EGYPT 77 

too early for him at Alexandria, and the long voyage was 
finished in safety. The sheik of Alexandria commanded the 
French to go away, but Napoleon did not go. For he was 
in the port of his ambition, within a few pulls of the oar 
from the cradle of empire and the nursery of fame. Before 
him lay the low crescented shore, where at Alexander's bid- 
ding a magnificent city rose to be the treasure house of his 
conquest of the universe, but where now only a miserable 
hamlet huddled amid the noble ruins. Beyond, stretched the 
magic east. 

Napoleon's star had not led him unharmed through the 
perils of the sea for him to turn back at the command of an 
ex-slave, the sheik of Alexandria. He assembled his ships 
just beyond the town, where the sands of the Libyan Desert 
roll down to the sea. There in the night, despite wind and 
weather and the caution of the naval commanders, he and a 
detachment of his army swung from rope ladders into the 
small boats tossing in the surf and waded dripping to the 
shore of Egypt. 

The first thing he did on landing was to stretch himself on 
the sand beside a clump of date palms and sleep for an hour 
to the surging of the waves. Before daybreak he was at 
the walls of Alexandria, on top of which the townspeople had 
noisily swarmed to repel the invader, chiefly with Arabic 
prayers and curses. The French, however, quickly scaled 
the walls and took the town. 

Napoleon was the first man of modern times to see that 
Egypt was the greatest prize the sword could win. Ceesar, 
Alexander and the ancient conquerors had made it the key- 
stone in their arch of conquest. For 500 years before Napo- 
leon's expedition, Egypt had been abandoned to the Arab 
and the Turk, and all but forgotten by Europe, which with 
the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope was no longer de- 
pendent upon the humpbacked ships of the desert. For five 
centuries a twilight rested upon the land of the Pharaohs 
and that half a thousand years of Egyptian history is almost 
as blank as the era of the Pyramid builders. 

It remained for the strategic eye of Napoleon to penetrate 



78 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

that dusk and to see that Egypt still was the centre of the 
world. And when he rapped at the gate of Alexandria he 
startled her out of an age long sleep. Over her hoary head 
the centuries had rolled since she drove the Crusaders from 
her shore and, lying down to rest on her sandy couch, yielded 
herself to the dreams of the Orient. The Christian dogs had 
been beaten off and the European barbarian had disappeared 
into his native wilderness. Egypt thought no more about hiin 
than we think of the grasshoppers when they are gone. 

When, therefore, the long-haired boy of France rudely in- 
vaded her slumber she knew nothing of the Great Revolu- 
tion which had roused the sleeping nations of Europe and 
which at last was bidding her wake again. Egypt hardly 
remembered there was a France and could not imagine what 
the French could want of her. To Napoleon's command for 
her to rise, therefore, she only yawned and begged, "Please 
go away and let me sleep." 

The Alexandria of to-day is as changed from the town Al- 
exander built and Napoleon captured as anything can be in 
the unchanging land of Egypt. Out of the desert of water 
in front of it and the desert of sand behind it, the minarets 
and marts of a modern city of 400,000 rise on the shore 
where Napoleon found only a squalid village of 5000 people 
huddled amid the ruins of a splendid imperial capital which 
before the opening of the Christian Era boasted a million 
inhabitants. Those -figures reflect the vicissitudes of Alex- 
andria in a period of more than 2000 years. 

Pompey's Pillar, which still springs above the roofs and 
towers, is the one landmark that has survived most of those 
centuries. But the famous lighthouse of Pharos no longer 
casts its beams on a wondering world ; instead, a useless fort 
cumbers its site. The hill which rises from among the ware- 
houses close by the custom house is still called Fort Napoleon, 
and the Oriental imagination sometimes insists that Napoleon 
built it in a night. Its summit is now crowned by the signal 
station of the port, set in the midst of trees and flowers, and 
with its pennants of many colours fluttering in the breeze be- 
neath the Sultan's flag. What really gave the elevation its 



THE DESCENT UPON EGYPT 79 

name was the fort which Napoleon established in a night. It 
lay outside the little town of that day and commanded the 
place as it now commands an excellent view of the sea. 

From another mound near by, where Pompey's polished 
shaft rises nearly seventy feet in a solid column of red 
granite, Napoleon watched and directed the assault upon the 
town wall in the dawn of his first day in Egypt. He prom- 
ised to inscribe on the pedestal of the pillar the names of those 
who fell in the attack, but he failed to do it and the poor 
youths of France missed immortality. However, they fared 
no harder than the man to whom this column was raised. He 
is utterly lost in the vulgar herd of conquerors and his pillar 
has been misnamed for Pompey, who was dead hundreds of 
years before it was sawed out of the quarry at Assouan. 

Napoleon gave hardly more time than the conventional 
traveller spares for Alexandria. Most of his army did not 
even see the city, but were marched around it toward the 
Nile, where he himself hastened to overtake them in their ad- 
vance on Cairo. 

While the tourist to-day is enjoying as comfortable and 
interesting a train ride of three hours and a quarter over 
the 129 miles of rail between Alexandria and Cairo as he 
could wish, the unchanging landscape of Egypt passes before 
his car window like a reel of moving pictures in a photo play 
of the reign of Pharaoh. 

For time has altered nothing in all the 200 generations and 
more since the first faint light of history twinkled in the 
Egyptian darkness. The same patient race of blue-skirted 
fellahin are still seen, scratching with their wooden ploughs the 
narrow strip of rich soil between the two deserts that lie in 
full view on either hand, or laboriously turning the ancient 
water wheels. Their lives and ways seem to be no more 
touched by progress than are those of the heavily burdened 
strings of camels which hump along. 

All that countryside remains as desolate to-day as before 
its fields first were gleaned. For the most fruitful soil in 
the world is cursed with the worst land laws and the most un- 
just system of taxation. Nowhere else is nature so bountiful 



80 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

and hardly anywhere else is man so mean as on those banks 
of the Nile. 

No wonder Napoleon's 20,000 soldiers as he marched them 
through that impoverished region were exasperated almost 
to the point of mutiny. They had sailed into the harbour of 
Alexandria with their mouths watering for the fabled flesh- 
pots of the land of Egypt, while their commander had confi- 
dently looked for the Egyptians with joyous acclaim to wel- 
come him as their deliverer from tyranny. 

Alas, the soldiers found the flesh-pots empty and Napoleon 
found that the people preferred their old yoke to a new one. 
Liberty, fraternity and equality, the magic watchwords of the 
French Revolution with which he had conquered the hearts 
of the Italians, were as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal 
in the dull ears of the wretched dwellers in the delta. 

The country nominally was under the Sultan of Turkey 
but the martial Mamelukes really ruled it in that day as the 
British are its real rulers in our day. After long ages of 
grinding despotism, hope was dead beyond revival in the 
breasts of the Egyptians. The miserable habitations of the 
people only mocked the hunger of the foraging soldiers who 
found nothing in the lean larders fit for the French palate. 
To set an example of self denial Napoleon himself slept with- 
out a tent in the midst of his army and at meal time limited 
his fare to a dish of lentils. 

Instead of living off the fat of this land for which the 
children of Israel sighed and murmured when Moses had led 
them out of Egypt, the invading army advanced with its 
supplies jealously guarded in its centre for fear of losing 
even what it had brought from home, assailed as it was by 
Mamelukes and Bedouins, who forever hovered on the hori- 
zon. 

When Napoleon left Alexandria he said that St. Louis, the 
latest French commander to invade Egypt, took four months 
to march to Cairo but that he would do it in two weeks. In 
spite of all the hardships that presented themselves he kept 
the schedule to the hour. The morning of the 14th day was 
just breaking over the Mokattom hills when three great heaps 



THE DESCENT UPON EGYPT 81 

of yellow limestones rose to view on the edge of the Libyan 
desert and he fired the fainting spirits of his tired and home- 
sick soldiers with the memorable reminder that from those 
Pyramids of Ghizeh forty centuries looked down upon them. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS 

1798-1799 AGE 28-29 

AS Napoleon marched to the conquest of the Egyptian 
capital in midsummer of 1798, the streets of Cario 
resounded night and day with the shrill pipes and mo- 
notonous drum beats of the dervishes, made familiar to us by 
midway imitations. At the first warning of the enemy's ad- 
vance the ulema, or wise men, marshalled the children in long 
processions, and led them again and again through the nar- 
row, winding lanes of the city, their young voices chanting an 
appeal for divine deliverance from the unbelieving hosts of 
France. 

Napoleon, on the other hand, invoked neither Allah nor 
Jehovah, but the spirit of the ages, when he reminded his 
troops that from yonder Pyramids the centuries looked down 
upon them. What a wonderful view point those centuries 
enjoyed atop the great cairn of Cheops, that memorable July 
morning in the year 1798, what well chosen reserved seats ! 

The journey out from Cairo to Ghizeh and its Pyramids is 
no longer made by ferry down the Nile and thence by camels 
or mule as in other days. On the contrary, it is only a 
twenty-minute spin in an automobile or a forty-minute ride 
in the company of sheeted Egyptians aboard a trolley car, 
with a curtained section for the veiled, dark-eyed sorceresses 
of the Nile. Handsome bridges arch the most historic of 
rivers, the veritable stream of time, first to a parklike island, 
and then to the farther bank, where the town of Ghizeh 
sprawls in the sun. Beyond Ghizeh a broad, almost straight 
avenue, five miles long, with the trolley tracks running be- 
neath a row of shady lebbakh trees, stretches across a plain, 

82 



THE BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS 83 

where little irrigating rivulets run about to refresh the soil 
in its never ending hand to hand struggle with the desert. 
The road itself is Bonapartist, having been laid out by the 
Khedive as an honour and convenience for the Empress Eu- 
genie at the time she visited Egypt to open the Suez Canal. 

Buffalos are by the roadside and little white herons are fly- 
ing over a mud village of the fellahin. Beyond that clump 
of huts, the Pyramids lift their bulk above the billows of sand 
which have beaten against their foundations nearly 5000 years 
and which roll upon them like the engulfing waves of the 
sea. Indeed a real sea wall five feet high is necessary for the 
protection of the road as it approaches its destination and is 
all that saves it from being submerged. Its last section is 
no more than a pier or diked causeway, with a big hotel and 
pretty garden rising at the end like a pier head out of an 
ocean of sand. 

There still remains a long, steep climb to the Pyramids in 
a walled and paved trench with the burning sun above and 
the burning sand all about. But the automobiles and trol- 
leys stop at the hotel and deliver their passengers over 
to the mercies of the desert and its children, a tribe of howl- 
ing Arabs with a herd of camels and donkeys. 

The visitor is well rewarded for his momentary trials. 
Surely Cheops is the most wonderful grandstand from which 
a battle ever was seen or a battlefield reviewed. Overhead 
bends the splendid blue vault of the Egyptian sky. Behind 
rolls the tempestuous desert. Below flows the Nile. Beyond 
the river, the domes and minarets of Cairo rise toward the 
cloudless heavens in white and gold against a background of 
bare yellow hills. These stand out on the eastern horizon 
like videttes guarding the green and slender valley from the 
oncoming sands of Arabia, forever striving to join forces 
with the sands of Libya and bury valley and city and river in 
one vast and desolate waste. 

Off in front some eight miles away there is a cluster of date 
palms about the village of Embabeh by the riverside. At the 
edge of that little grove the celebrated Battle of the Pyra- 
mids was fought. There the west met the east in combat for 



84 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

the first time in 500 years, when the Mamelukes made their 
one and only stand against the advancing French. 

On that plain 10,000 turbaned horsemen, each mounted 
man with three or four footmen to serve him, were drawn up 
to challenge Napoleon, their shirts of steel and their gay, ori- 
ental accoutrements glistening in the sun. Behind this line 
of brilliant cavalry there were thousands of janissaries, while 
within the earthworks of Embabeh there were gathered more 
thousands of raw conscripts with many cannon. 

But the Mamelukes in their self-confidence relied on them- 
selves alone to strike down and trample the French beneath 
their horses' hoofs. Macaulay says that their commander, 
Mourad Bey, could not believe that his little antagonist who 
rode like a butcher was the greatest warrior in Europe, while 
the Mamelukes felt nothing but contempt for infantry. A 
man was no soldier in their eyes who did not have a horse, 
and they laughed as they saw Napoleon's troops trotting 
toward them like dogs. 

When the French came within striking distance, the Mame- 
lukes, with their weird war cry, dashed at the foot soldiers of 
France to find themselves beating against solid squares of steel 
and fire. Dazed at first and then enraged they rode again 
and again to the slaughter. 

But when they saw their army broken into two parts and 
the irresistible French squares wedging in between, they fled 
in mad panic. One division galloped over to the Pyramids 
and vanished into the desert, while another raced into the 
village of Embabeh, from behind the guns of which they sal- 
lied forth once more only to fall before the unwavering 
squares like grass before a steam mowing machine. Those 
who escaped from the French leaped from their useless 
horses into the Nile, along with a mob of other fugitives. 
Most of them swam to safety; but history makes the grew- 
some record that after the victors had finished robbing the 
thousands of dead bodies that bestrew the plain they amused 
themselves by angling for the drowned, who numbered 1500. 
The character of the conflict is established by the number of 
French killed, which was 30. 



THE BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS 85 

Such was the Battle of the Pyramids, a combat between the 
middle ages and modern times. In a military sense, it was 
not above the level of a massacre, but it was a great battle in 
its consequences. 

It shattered forever the despotism of the Mamelukes, those 
alien slaves who, revolting against their masters, had ruled 
Egypt for nearly six centuries. And it did far more than 
that. When the blue squares of France broke through the 
Mameluke line on that plain down by the little grove of 
date palms, they opened the lane by which the west passed 
through to the east. From the field of the Battle of the Pyra- 
mids, Occidental civilisation started on its eventful journey 
round the earth to the banks of the Ganges, to the shore of 
the Sea of Japan and over the Great Wall of China. 

Napoleon himself was not to realise his dream of empire 
in the Orient, but there by the Nile his sword cut the first 
breach in the barrier with which Islam had so long shut in 
the peoples of Asia and shut out Christendom and the modern 
world. Here, as in Italy and everywhere, that sword of his 
was only the highly efficient instrument of the Great Revo- 
lution, on whose red anvil it was forged, for opening the 
way to new institutions and the unity of mankind. 

When night fell on the field of Embabeh the camp fires of 
Napoleon lit up the Pyramids of Ghizeh, and from the lofty 
summit of the tomb of Cheops the astronomers of France be- 
held, though faintly, the constellation of the southern cross, 
while French sentries patrolled the shadow of the Sphinx in 
its haunted hollow. 

There is a tradition among the Arabs of the Pyramids that 
all the scars of time and the wounds of a hundred wars, 
which the Sphinx carries, were inflicted by Napoleon's 
soldiers, who used its mystifying and majestic countenance as 
a target. That, however, is only a legend for the tourist. 
Long before the discovery of gunpowder, the Arabs had laid 
iconoclastic hands on the beard of this god of the desert — for 
the Sphinx of Ghizeh is not a woman — and it was the Mame- 
lukes themselves who made a target of his inscrutable face 
and shot away the nose. 



86 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

It was more than a week after the battle when Napoleon 
himself crossed the river and entered Cairo. He had no more 
than established his headquarters in the midst of an un- 
friendly city, cowed by fear in the presence of ' ' the sultan of 
fire," than he was called away to the desert to beat back the 
Mamelukes who were gathering again. There, while in Mar- 
mont's tent on the dreary waste, the staggering news came to 
him that the French naval fleet which conveyed him to the 
East had been utterly destroyed in the Battle of the Nile 
on August 1st. He had dodged Nelson all the way from 
Toulon to Alexandria, but the British Admiral had found 
the hiding place of his fighting ships in the Bay of Aboukir, 
which is one of the forty mouths of the Nile, and had cap- 
tured or sunk them all. 

The folly of the Egyptian expedition had received a ter- 
rible crown. Only two really serviceable French warships 
remained afloat in all the Mediterranean. The mistress of 
the seas literally had marooned Napoleon on the sands of 
Egypt. A sorrier plight could hardly be imagined in the 
chances of war. 

To a man of his force, however, difficulties and disasters 
are only hurdles to be leaped. He concealed his feelings, 
even from those who looked on in the moment he received 
this hard blow, and at once turned toward all a confident 
front. "This is the hour," he said, "when characters of a 
superior order should show themselves. An obligation to do 
great things is laid upon us. Seas which we do not command 
separate us from France, but no seas divide Africa from Asia. 
Here we will found an empire. ' ' 

Knowing that the Cairenes would be emboldened by Nel- 
son's victory, he hastened back to his headquarters in the 
home of Elfi Bey by the shore of a pond at the edge of the 
old town. That pond is now the principal square of the city, 
the Ezbekiyeh, which is the very heart of modern Cairo. 

Tourists, rejoicing in their first white helmets, and smoking 
Egyptian cigarettes in wicker chairs among the palms on the 
broad porch of their hotel, while they watch the passing show 
of the Orient, have the romantic sense that they are charac- 



THE BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS 87 

ters in some one of the many six biggest sellers whose authors 
have worked up this scene on the terrace at Shepheard's. 
Probably few of them are aware that the first party of tour- 
ists to find quarters where this hotel now stands was per- 
sonally conducted by Napoleon Bonaparte, and that where a 
European bookseller has his shop near by, the palace walls of 
Elfi Bey rose when Egypt was ruled by the Little Corporal. 

Over beyond the Ezbekiyeh, where the plashing of the 
waters among the tall palms is drowned by the clangour of 
trolley cars, there was an open field in other days. There 
Napoleon planned a grand balloon ascension to distract and 
impress the public mind, for he had brought from France the 
first balloon ever seen in Egypt. But the air like the sea 
failed the conqueror of the land. The amazement of the 
Egyptians was quickly succeeded by amusement, their ex- 
clamations of awe by shouts of derision as they saw his gas- 
bag collapse and tumble to earth. 

He tried also to move the sheiks and wise men to wonder 
by an exhibition which his French scientists gave, of elec- 
tricity, chemistry and other strange experiments in natural 
science. He succeeded with the more advanced minds in his 
audience, but many of his guests viewed the demonstration 
with stolid indifference as unequal to the marvels of eastern 
magic. 

"Let them make me be in Morocco and here at the same 
time, ' ' was a challenge which one of the sheiks gave. When 
the scientific men told him such a thing was impossible the 
sheik stroked his beard and turned away with contempt for 
the sorcerers of the west who could only do tricks with bottles 
and wires but could not make a man be in two places at once. 

Still another effort to show the people the usefulness of 
western science was made at the nilometer on the Island of 
Rhoda in the oldest of old Cairo. This is the ancient gauge 
of Egyptian prosperity, which for nearly 1200 years has 
measured the rise of the Nile and indicated the lack or 
abundance of water for the overflowing of the thirsty delta. 
"When Napoleon found that the Mamelukes were accustomed 
to fixing the tax rate the moment the nilometer indicated a 



88 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

good supply of water, lie ordered an investigation by his 
engineers, who dug down and unearthed a fraudulent device 
for manipulating the gauge in the interests of higher taxation. 

Only the few with more advanced minds, however, wel- 
comed the labours of the scientists from France, and the lab- 
oratory, the Egyptian institute and the library which they 
established. The multitude hated everything that was new. 

The construction of a canal across Egypt was part of Na- 
poleon's Oriental dream, and he carried with him the engi- 
neers to plan it. The idea was by no means original. For 
those narrowly divided seas had been united by Darius 500 
years before Christ, and the Macedonian Ptolemies had wid- 
ened the Persian's canal and erected a system of locks. But 
by the reign of Cleopatra, Darius' ditch had silted up, and 
it remained for the Romans under Trajan to restore it once 
more in the first of the Christian centuries. The heedless 
Arabs, however, left the canal to the winds and the sands 
and the desert swallowed it again. When Napoleon came, 
the Egyptians had forgotten even its course, and his engineers 
from France invented one of those impossibilities with which 
the cautious and the judicious were forever fettering his eagle 
flights. 

The learned academicians somehow made the discovery, 
apparently without the trouble of taking measurements, that 
the Red Sea was nearly thirty-three feet higher than the 
waters of the Mediterranean. They warned the young Gen- 
eral-in-chief that if he dug a simple sea-level canal he would 
drown Egypt, and he dropped the project, leaving it to be 
carried out in the reign of another Napoleon, nearly three 
quarters of a century afterward, when Ferdinand de Les- 
seps, an unscientific French consul, a cousin of the Empress 
Eugenie, found that the two seas were virtually on a level. 

Napoleon was the first to undertake the heavy and thank- 
less task of cleaning up and stirring up the slothful east. 
The easy-going, disorganised Egyptians were exasperated by 
his passion for cleanliness, order, precision and efficiency. 
Every innovation for the purpose of improving their lives 



THE BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS 89 

and easing their labours was resented and resisted. Work- 
men who were engaged to carry bricks on public construc- 
tion indignantly rebelled against the wheelbarrow as 
if it were the vehicle of evil. The Egyptians had carried 
their bricks on their heads since the strike of the children of 
Israel, and any other method was to them an invention of 
the devil, an impiety which they refused to endure. 

Religious differences were the most prolific source of trou- 
ble. Napoleon had done his best to avert them by all manner 
of flirtation with Mahometanism. He promoted and partici- 
pated in the fete of Mahomet; he even ordered an Oriental 
costume for himself and did everything short of becoming a 
Mahometan, as some historians have accused him of doing. 

The French had, however, most stupidly outraged the feel- 
ings of the faithful by stabling their horses in the mosque of 
el Azhar. This Oamia el Azhar, the greatest university in 
all Islam, is still one of the most interesting sights of Cairo. 
Within its walls the lamp of learning was first lighted when 
Oxford and Paris and Heidelberg yet sat in primeval dark- 
ness, and its priests have kept the wick trimmed for upwards 
of 900 years. 

Napoleon himself surely was too wise to have desecrated 
the venerable mosque, and when the priests complained that 
it had been turned into a stable he immediately restored it to 
them. All his efforts to bridge the gulf between himself and 
Islam were unavailing, however, when six weeks after the 
Battle of the Nile, Turkey took sides with the British and 
declared a holy war on the French. The circle of his mis- 
fortunes was now complete. 

The Sultan being the spiritual head of the Moslem world, 
his declaration of war aroused the religious fanaticism of the 
Egyptians. "From the minarets of Cairo, maledictions were 
called down upon the French in a language they could not 
understand, and in October the people rose in a frenzied out- 
break against the foreigners. Cairo was no more than beaten 
back into sullen obedience when the gathering of an army in 
Syria, beneath the crescent of the Sultan and under the com- 



90 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

mand of the Pasha of Acre, who had merited the name of 
Dejezzar, or "the Butcher," again gravely threatened the 
French occupation of Egypt. 

Thus at twenty-nine, Napoleon was alone with his heavy 
responsibilities and his youthful ambitions in the vast alien 
world of the east. If he turned back it was only to look 
across 1500 miles of sea, with Britannia ruling the wave. If 
he stood still in Egypt it was only to give the Turks, in alli- 
ance with the British, an opportunity to swarm down upon 
him and overwhelm him at their leisure. To avoid being 
caught in a trap, he must hasten to surprise the Sultan be- 
fore he could marshal his hordes. Although he could invade 
Asia with a little band of only 12,000 men, he was not with- 
out a glimmer of hope that after whipping the Butcher of 
Acre, he might be able to march across Persia, conquer Eng- 
land in India and still "take Europe in the rear." 

The old caravan route to Syria is marked at every step by 
footprints in the sands of time. As Napoleon set out upon it 
in February, 1798, he was thrilled by the thought that at last 
his feet were in the path of Alexander. Notwithstanding the 
disappointments that had crowded upon him since the day 
he landed on the shore of the Orient he still cherished the 
dream that this might be his own pathway to an eastern em- 
pire which would rival the great Macedonian's and make him 
the master of the world from the Ganges to the Seine. 



CHAPTER XII 
INTO THE HOLY LAND 

1799 AGE 29 

THE traveller from Egypt to Palestine goes to-day by 
rail through the land of Goshen to Port Said and 
thence by boat to Jaffa. For Napoleon there was no 
iron road, only a trail in the sand, and no safe passage by 
water, where British ships were scouting along the coast. 

After more than a century had passed, the situation was 
strangely changed at the outbreak of the war in 1914. In 
this later instance, England occupied Egypt, and France 
was her ally, while Turkey in declaring war upon her, had 
the support of Germany. And the Turco-German forces, in 
their plans of an Egyptian invasion, were confronted by the 
same problem that troubled the French in the matter of mov- 
ing their big guns. Napoleon was obliged to send his heavy 
siege artillery by sea, because it could not be dragged across 
the desert. It was enough for his army to drag its feet over 
the more than 150 miles of hot sand drifts and for the long 
camel trains to bear the burden of food and ammunition. 

For a week and more, in February, 1799, his soldiers 
marched in a land that offered not a morsel of food and 
where there was only an occasional bunch of desert weeds for 
the hundreds of beasts with which they advanced. For there 
is hardly an oasis in all the miserable desert of El Tih. En- 
gineers went ahead to clear the wells, which were merely 
holes in the sand. But the army had to march in divisions 
a day apart lest the wells be drunk dry at a single gulp, and 
the bitter brackish water was measured out like brandy to 
the thirsty mouths of the soldiers. 

In the skirmishes Napoleon had developed the camel as an 

91 



92 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

efficient aid for Murat's cavalry. With two armed men on 
the back of this steed of the desert it became a thing of terror 
even to the Arab horsemen. Fortunately they did not molest 
the Syrian expedition and the army encountered no human 
enemy on the long, silent, burning road through the desert, 
which Napoleon said "was the image of immensity to my 
thoughts. It had neither beginning nor end. It was an 
ocean for the foot of man. ' ' 

Out of a vast waste El Arish, the first outpost of Asia, rises 
in the valley of the Biblical "River of Egypt." Before it 
stretches a beautiful irrigated plain where date palms and 
fig trees cast their cool shadows and where the shining green 
of the vines is a most welcome sight to eyes long blinded by 
the glare of sky and sand. 

El Arish is so old that history cannot count its years. Its 
camels and mules drink from a stone trough that was once 
the sarcophagus of a proud Egyptian, and it was only the day 
before yesterday, in its reckoning of time, when Baldwin I, 
King of Jerusalem, lay down to die within its walls. It is 
to-day a town of livid white houses and perhaps 7000 people, 
who plunge about ankle deep in its sandy streets as they go 
to bend their heads to Mecca in the mosque or to swell the 
chaffering hubbub of the bazars. 

When Napoleon stood before its gate he had no artillery 
with which to bombard the garrison behind the walls. There- 
fore, he set up behind his earthworks twenty cross sticks and 
hung a soldier's coat and hat on each. History asks us to 
believe that the simple Turks blazed away at those scarecrows 
three days, until their ammunition was nearly exhausted, 
when they surrendered. 

Napoleon resumed his toilsome march in the desert from 
El Arish, an experience made doubly vexatious by Kleber's 
division missing its way and wandering about for forty-eight 
hours without coming upon a well. Some of the men, dis- 
gusted and discouraged, had angrily broken their muskets. 
When they came up, the General-in-chief only gently ehided 
the poor, half -crazed mutineers. "It would have been bet- 



INTO THE HOLY LAND 93 

ter," he told them, "to stick your heads in the sand and die 
with honour than to give yourselves up to disorder." 

Soon the weary men of France looked upon the verdant 
and fertile plains of the Philistines, smiling a spring-time wel- 
come, while the storied mountains of Judea loomed blue 
against the eastern horizon. At last the desert was left be- 
hind, with all its strange trials, not least among which was the 
necessity of messing on camels, asses and dogs. 

Before the French, rose the walls and mosques of Gaza, the 
proud city of the Philistines, the doors of whose gates, gate- 
posts, bar and all, Samson carried off on his stalwart shoul- 
ders, after having slain his thousand with the jawbone of an 
ass. There, too, at Gaza the lusty Danite grew his second 
head of hair in place of the locks Delilah had shorn and, there, 
with his strength thus renewed, he pulled down the pillars 
of the house while 3000 Philistines stood on the roof to mock 
him. 

After having been sacked forty times, Gaza still is an im- 
portant and busy place of 40,000 population. Alexander 
had to besiege the town two months before he could enter its 
gates, but its latest captor, Napoleon, took it without tiring a 
shot. Then he marched on toward Jaffa, across the renowned 
battlefields of David, where the ark of the covenant was the 
prize of victory. Up on the bordering mountain side is the 
scene of the duel with Goliath, where with the pebbles of a 
brook that armoured giant of Gath was laid low. 

When the beauty of Israel lay slain upon the high places, 
and David wept for Saul, he saw, even through his tears, 
this land of his hated enemy filled with exultation over his 
loss, and he cried out : ' ' Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in 
the streets of Ascalon, lest the daughters of the Philistines 
rejoice." There are few indeed to be told in Gath to-day, 
for a wretched huddle of Arab huts is all that is left of 
the once warlike city, while orchard trees and onion patches 
cover the streets of Ascalon, the birthplace of Herod the 
Great. 

The French marched over the fields of Philistia in early 



94 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

March and their beauty took Napoleon by surprise. He lik- 
ened the scene to the landscape of Languedoc, about Toulouse, 
in southern France. It is indeed a lovely land, a veritable 
garden of wild flowers and a riot of colour. 

Napoleon steered his course toward the tower of the forty 
martyrs at Ramleh, where the Franciscans welcomed him to 
their convent, which stands on the traditional site of the house 
of Joseph of Arimathea. Now the good fathers not only 
show their visitors the altar dedicated to the rich man who 
came among the poor Galilean outcasts at the foot of the 
cross and, taking the body of Jesus, laid it in his own tomb, 
but they exhibit also the room of the young General-in-chief 
of France. 

Through the town of Ramleh runs one of the two railroads 
of Palestine, that from Jaffa to Jerusalem, where the pil- 
grims to the Holy City are drawn up into the mountains by 
locomotives that were first built for the use of the French in 
the construction of the Panama Canal. The ancient high- 
way to Jerusalem also passes by the town, and Bourrienne 
suggested to Napoleon that he march to the city of David. 
But his chief turned aside from Jerusalem as he had from 
Rome. "I am not ambitious for the fate of Cassius," he 
said. 

With his back to the Judean Mountains, he marched on 
Jaffa, past Lydda, at whose gate, according to the prophecy 
of Mahomet, Christ will slay Antichrist on the last day. 
Lydda boasts above all that it was the scene of the martyrdom 
of St. George, the Christianized soldier of Rome who rescued 
the maiden from the dragon, and it was there by his tradi- 
tional grave that Richard Coeur de Lion adopted St. George 
as the patron saint of England. 

When Napoleon arrived before the walls of Jaffa he found 
a garrison of 4000 Turks, with forty guns, determined with 
Moslem fanaticism to resist his entry into the town. While 
he was directing the assault on the place, a musket ball carried 
away his hat and struck dead a colonel who stood behind him, 
and who was five feet ten inches tall. "That is the second 



INTO THE HOLY LAND 95 

time," the Little Corporal remarked, "that I owe my life to 
my height." 

After two days of bombardment, the French rushed into 
Jaffa with orders to kill all persons in arms, when some Al- 
banians shouted from the windows of a big khan, or Arabian 
inn, that they with 2000 other survivors of the Turkish gar- 
rison had taken refuge in the khan and would fight to the 
death or surrender only on condition that their lives be 
spared. Notwithstanding the orders were to "take no pris- 
oners" in a town that had to be carried by storm, and whose 
governor had cut off the head of a messenger, the terms were 
accepted. 

"Why in the devil's name have they done this?" Napoleon 
exclaimed as he saw from his tent the band of captives ap- 
proaching. He was without food for prisoners, without ships 
to send them away from the theatre of war, and even without 
men to spare for a prison guard. If he set them free they 
would hasten on to join the army of Dejezzar, at Acre. In- 
deed many of them, he said, were men he had paroled at the 
capture of El Arish. "What do you expect me to do with 
them?" he angrily demanded. 

Their fate was inevitable. In a conflict between civilisa- 
tion and barbarism, the civilised force sinks to the level of 
the barbarian. It is the old familiar story, heard around the 
world, of fighting the devil with fire. If it had remained for 
him whose own nation was without sin of a like nature to cast 
the first stone, Napoleon might not have been assailed so viru- 
lently for the horrible Jaffa massacre. 

The prisoners were marched down to the beach and shot. 
Some leaped into the sea and swam for their lives to the rocks 
which make the harbour of Jaffa famous — or infamous — the 
fabled rocks to which the virgin Andromeda was chained. 
But the appetite of the firing squads had grown by what it 
fed on. Not to be cheated of their full measure of blood, 
they rested their muskets on the beach and by making an 
Oriental sign of reconciliation they enticed the miserable 
fugitives from the perils of the foaming sea, to shoot them 
down as they were about to swim ashore. 



96 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OP NAPOLEON 

Jaffa is the portal of the Holy Land. Thousands of pil- 
grims every year jump from their steamers into the arms of 
Arab boatmen, who row them between the jagged rocks and 
land them on the shore of the strange, tumultuous east. The 
dragomans of the town are overflowing with amazingly minute 
information about the exact landing place in this ancient 
Joppa of the cedar of Lebanon which the King of Tyre sent 
for the building of Solomon 's temple ; the veritable point of de- 
parture whence Jonah, fleeing from the presence of God, 
sailed hence into the storm, only to be flung overboard to the 
whale ; the precise site of the house of Simon the tanner, 
where Peter tarried many days, and the tomb of Dorcas, the 
woman full of good works and alms deeds, whom the apostle 
raised from the dead. 

But they are less definite and voluble about the more re- 
cent ways and habitations of Napoleon. After holding a pro- 
longed conference on the subject, their chief spokesman could 
offer no better excuse for their ignorance than by saying: 
"You see, Napoleon did not get into the Bible." And of 
course, that was his fault, not theirs. 

The fathers of the Armenian monastery, however, qualify 
in profane history by showing the very cell in which Napo- 
leon slept while he made their monastic home his own. Their 
tall, imposing cavass, or "shooting man," also conducts the 
curious down into the cavernous and pillared place which, 
after Napoleon's departure, became the celebrated pest hos- 
pital of Jaffa. 

From Jaffa, Napoleon marched up over the Plain of Sharon, 
with the Mediterranean on the one hand and on the other, 
first the mountains of Judea and then the mountains of Sa- 
maria. He passed the fallen temples of Caesarea, rounded the 
base of Mt. Carmel and followed the beach of Haifa to 
Acre. 

The highway that to-day leads to Acre, to Nablous, to 
Nazareth, and to Damascus, rough though it be, is one of 
the three of four real carriage roads of Palestine. The good 
roads movement there dates only from the pilgrimage of the 
German Emperor in 1898, when the Sultan ordered some 



INTO THE HOLY LAND 97 

road building for the Kaiser's convenience, and the work has 
been continued fitfully for the benefit of the tourists. 

The natives naturally take no interest in the subject, for 
while Judah could not overwhelm the men of the valley and 
the plain because they had chariots of iron, few chariots have 
they to-day, these men of the valley and plain. The ass and 
the camel and the immemorial trails and paths suffice them. 
There were lately only two automobiles in all the country, 
and they were owned by foreigners. 

Haifa, which sits at the foot of Mt. Carmel across the 
Bay of Acre, is one of the two ports of the Holy Land and it 
is a terminus of one of the two railroads of Palestine, that 
which runs up from the Mediterranean to Damascus. 

Like Jaffa, Haifa, too, is receiving the stimulus of progress 
from a prosperous German religious colony. The colonists 
live by themselves in modern houses and broad, shady streets. 
To step from their leafy, flowery quarter into the stony, 
squalid, noisy old town is like passing in a minute from 
Europe to Asia, from Christendom to Islam, from the twen- 
tieth century to the tenth. 

The road from Haifa to Acre probably is the best example 
of road building in the Turkish Empire. Not the Sultan, 
however, but old Neptune was its builder. It lies on the 
hard beach which borders the curving bay and runs through 
the ford across the brook Kishon, by which Elijah slew the 
prophets of Baal. Over the shells where the Phoenicians 
used to gather the materials for their Tyrian purple, it now 
plunges into the little stream whose waters trickle across the 
sands where, according to Pliny, glass was discovered, and 
finally it comes to a halt before the gate of Acre. 

That gate, at which Napoleon pounded for two months in 
the spring of 1799, has, through all recorded time, been the 
tollgate on the highway between Africa and Asia, between 
Egypt and Constantinople, between the Holy Land and 
Syria — and blood has been its toll. If the bones of the mul- 
titude who have been slain at that cruel portal could be gath- 
ered in a heap, Acre would sit in the shadow of a mountain 
of dead. 



98 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

In the Crusades, to go back no farther, it was the gate to 
the Holy Land, and hundreds of thousands of Crusaders and 
Saracens are said to have perished before it. Behind it the 
hosts of the cross made their last stand, and when Acre fell 
(St. Jean d'Acre it was called), the Crusaders lay buried 
beneath its ruined walls, never again to rise and battle for 
the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre. 

And this blood-drenched threshold of Acre is the "Gate of 
Nazareth ! ' ' For it looks out upon the hills where only 
twenty miles away dwelt the meek and forbearing Nazarene 
who taught the lesson so hard for men to learn : ' ' Whosoever 
shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other 
also." 

It had been 500 years and more since an army from 
Christendom had presented itself before the gate of Acre 
when Napoleon came to challenge this stronghold of Turkish 
power. Before him stretched the classic highway of empire 
to the famous ladder of Tyre, leaning against a white, rocky 
promontory. Behind that headland lies the city of Hiram, 
whose capture is counted among the most celebrated ex- 
ploits of Alexander the Great. 

Surely this new Alexander would make short work of Acre, 
the savage den of a Bosnian slave who boasted the bloody title 
of Dejezzar, which means "the butcher," "the beheader," 
"the cutthroat" or something equally terrible. But this 
barbarian did not stand alone at the Acre gate. The British 
lion was crouching there in the path of Napoleon. 

By a dramatic combination of circumstances which the 
playwright and the novelist might hesitate to employ and 
which makes history seem theatrical, Napoleon found stand- 
ing on either side of Dejezzar two men who had crossed his 
path in other years and other lands. One of them was a 
daring young English sailor of fortune who, after serving 
with Swedish and Turkish fleets, had joined the British navy 
and was at Toulon when it fell under the fire of Napoleon's 
batteries. It was he who stayed behind to blow up the mag- 
azines and cheat the victors of their spoils. 

In a later daredevil adventure he was captured as a sus- 



INTO THE HOLY LAND 99 

pected spy and confined in the temple at Paris for two years. 
After appealing in vain to the members of the government 
to be exchanged as a prisoner of war, he addressed a plea 
for assistance to Napoleon on his return from Italy, but re- 
ceived no reply. The prisoner in the temple was Sidney 
Smith. 

The other ally of Dejezzar was a Frenchman and a gradu- 
ate of the Ecole Militaire in Paris. He and Napoleon were 
at the Ecole together, where they quarrelled and kicked each 
other's shins black and blue under the desks in the classroom. 
This was Phelippeaux. 

Phelippeaux was an aristocrat and an enemy of the Repub- 
lic. Being in Paris and ready for plots he aided Smith to 
escape from the temple just one week to a day before Napo- 
leon's departure for Toulon and the east. They fled to Eng- 
land, and when Smith was sent to Egypt to watch and thwart 
Napoleon, Phelippeaux eagerly joined him in the expedition 
against his old schoolroom foe. 

While the army was slowly labouring across the desert, 
Smith, racing on ahead with his little fleet, pounced upon the 
French flotilla, having on board the siege train and ammuni- 
tion. Napoleon, thus left without the necessary means of 
besieging the town, saw his own guns mounted on the walls 
by Phelippeaux and turned against him. 

Forty times in two months he hurled his little force in 
vain against the gate of Acre under the fire from the town, 
and often under another stream of fire from the British ships. 
In the midst of the siege an army of Turks from Damascus, 
boasting themselves innumerable as the sands of the sea or as 
the stars of heaven, bore down upon the French rear. 

To meet the Turks and British in front and beat off the 
Turks that were swarming behind him, Napoleon had now an 
army of only 9000 men. If caught between the two forces, 
his little band would certainly be smashed to pieces. To 
avert that catastrophe, he determined to divide his forces, 
hasten into the mountains of Galilee and there challenge the 
horde from Damascus on its march to the relief of Acre. 



CHAPTER XIII 
HIS FIRST RETREAT 

1799 AGE 29-30 

WHEN Napoleon marched into the mountains of Gal- 
ilee, in the month of April, 1799, to stem the tide of 
Turks pouring down upon him from Damascus, he 
matched 4000 men against 30,000. For he dared take no 
larger number from the siege of Acre, where Turkish troops 
and British ships were holding the town against him. 

The first shock of battle reverberated about the traditional 
Mount of the Beatitudes, the Horns of Hattin, where General 
Junot, with only 300 men in a square withstood an advancing 
column of 4000 Turkish horsemen. Next Kleber's infantry 
met and repelled a large body of cavalry at Cana, where a 
Greek priest shows the stone jars in which the water was 
turned into wine for the wedding feast. 

The Turks were bursting into the valley of the Jordan when 
Napoleon himself struck out along the bridle path that leads 
from Acre up into Nazareth, where, seeing the smoke of 
battle curling about the heights of the town, he spurred his 
horse to the scene of combat. Descending between Mt. Tabor 
and the Mountain of the Precipitation, down the cliff of 
which the unbelieving Nazarenes threatened to cast the 
prophet who was not without honour save among his own 
people, he looked out upon the historic Plain of Esdraelon or 
Jezreel. 

There, the young champion of the west, fresh from his vic- 
tory in the cockpit of Europe entered the lists in this cock- 
pit of Asia. Lifting his glass, his eye swept the field of 
strife. In the west rose Mt. Carmel by the sea, and to the 
south the hills of Samaria. Over to the east, where the moun- 
tains of Gilead come down to the River Jordan, the Mos- 

100 



HIS FIRST RETREAT 101 

lem enemy was encamped in a black mass of camel's hair 
tents. 

At the foot of Tabor, General Kleber, with no hope or 
thought that the General-in-chief was coming to his rescue, 
was stubbornly holding back a big horde of mounted men as 
they advanced from their camp and furiously strove to 
crush his little force against the base of the mountain. 
The Turkish dead lay in windrows all about him. 

For hours Kleber had been battling with despair. He 
wished only to break through the Turkish lines or at least see 
his brave but exhausted band die like soldiers rather than be 
butchered like sheep. Soon he must tire his last cartridge. 

With an instant grasp of the desperate situation, Napoleon 
sent his small body of cavalry across the plain through fields 
of wheat six feet high, which screened them from the Turks. 
The cavalrymen gave the enemy a wide berth until they were 
in his rear, when they closed in to cut him off from his camp 
and his line of retreat over the Jordan. As the Turks in their 
surprise and bewilderment discovered these French horse- 
men behind them they turned from Kleber. 

That was the moment for Napoleon to deliver his second 
stroke. Leading in person a force of infantry within a gun- 
shot of the Turkish line, their fire suddenly burst upon the 
foe from the field of grain. At the sight of Napoleon emerg- 
ing from the wheat, Kleber 's hard-pressed and despairing 
band made the Galilean hills ring with cheers. 

Finding the French springing upon them from every di- 
rection as if they were a multitude, and finding themselves 
in the centre of a triangle, the 30,000 Turks broke in mad 
disorder. They fled to the Jordan, scampered off toward the 
Sea of Galilee or hid in the hills, leaving behind them 400 
camels, scores of horses, many guns, abundant ammunition 
and food enough to last the French a year. 

Mt. Tabor is the most historic among all Napoleon's ex- 
traordinary battlefields. That plain of Esdraelon has been 
the prize ring of the nations of the east through 5000 years 
that are told, and we know not how much longer through 
ages untold. 



102 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The smoke of the locomotive now rises close beneath the 
hills of Nazareth as a train from Damascus enters the plain 
on its way to Haifa. And the trains of antiquity, the camel 
trains, ignoring the new highway of iron, course tediously 
along the old caravan route, by which the children of the 
east poured down upon the children of Israel. 

A clump of trees, in the shadow of Mt. Gilboa, marks the 
still flowing fountain, where, rallying to Gideon's trumpet 
call, the invincible 300 qualified as war dogs by lapping up 
the water, dog fashion with their tongues, and overwhelmed 
the Midianites and Amalekites although they came as grass- 
hoppers for multitude. Farther on are the huts of Zerin, 
the once royal city of Jezreel, where from the window of her 
ivory palace, Queen Jezebel, that byword among women, 
looked out with hard, covetous eyes upon Naboth's vineyard 
over where Mt. Gilboa still shows the wine presses cut in its 
rocky side. Again she looked with terror to see the venge- 
ful Jehu in his chariot furiously rushing down from the 
mountains of Gilead to deliver her to the devouring dogs. 

There in the plain lies the first battlefield of David. Close 
by, the sun is baking the wretched hovels where the witch 
of Endor told Saul's tragic fortune, while toward the south 
rise the hills where Jonathan was laid low by the Philis- 
tines, and Saul fell on his sword, moving David to exclaim, 
' ' How are the mighty fallen ! ' ' 

From the summit of Mt. Tabor, above the spot where Kle- 
ber was beset with his back to the mountain wall, Deborah 
saw the stars in their courses fighting against Sisera and his 
900 iron chariots, and sang her song of cruel victory. It was 
there on that plain, in that coliseum of gladiatorial combats, 
that stadium where through uncounted generations humanity 
has been the football, that the last pitched battle of the Cru- 
sades was fought. There, too, the last battle of all, the finish 
fight between the hosts of good and evil, is to be fought, for 
part of the plain is "the place which is called in the Jewish 
tongue Armageddon," that is the "Valley of the Megiddo." 

The village of Nain, a welcome oasis for the soul in the 
midst of all that waste of war, squats near the foot of Mt. 



HIS FIRST RETREAT 103 

Tabor. At the sight of that poor little hamlet, the mind 
turns gladly from scenes that speak of 200 generations of 
slaughter, from hate to love, from the taking of life to the 
giving of life ; for there in the gates of Nain, Jesus restored 
the widow's son and dried the widow's tears. 

As one enters the vale of Nazareth from the war trodden 
plain, the message of peace which the little town sends out 
into a warring world holds a new and clearer meaning. 
Nazareth itself lies in a pretty mountain ravine, with schools 
and orphanages and hospitals, the gifts of the Christian 
world to the boyhood village of Jesus, looking fondly down 
upon it from the surrounding heights. 

At the Virgin's Fountain, the only water supply in the 
town now as in the olden time, the beauty of the girls and 
young mothers, who come to fill their water jugs even as 
Mary must have come, is really striking. To that fountain 
Napoleon went after the battle of Mt. Tabor, and there he 
received the homage of the people. 

In the monastery of the Annunciation he slept, where, tra- 
ditionally, stood the home of the Holy Family — where "the 
Word was made flesh." There the visitor is conducted in a 
cavernous region to the marble slab, worn smooth by pious 
lips, where the angel paused before Mary, and on to the 
"kitchen of the Virgin." The fathers of the monastery have 
treasured through the century the bed and room where the 
young warrior rested, amid the scenes hallowed by the youth 
of the Prince of Peace, whose sword was of the spirit and 
whose kingdom was not of this world. 

When Napoleon returned to the gate of Acre he brought 
to his besieging forces the news of victory to cheer them in 
their forlorn hope. But the sun of a Syrian summer was 
beating upon them in the unshaded plain with a fire more 
destructive than that which belched from the walls and the 
ships. Phelippeaux succumbed to its burning rays, strug- 
gling to the last to settle the old score with his schoolmate 
at the Ecole of Paris. The unburied dead lay in a heap 
against the stubborn wall, threatening the health of the forces 
on both sides. 



104 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

One day in early May when Napoleon saw a fleet of thirty 
sail bearing down upon Acre with thousands of Turkish 
soldiers coming to the relief of the town, the siege took on a 
spirit of desperation. In a last effort to capture the place 
before the reinforcements arrived, the French flung them- 
selves madly at the walls, and with scaling ladders carried the 
tricolour flag to one of the towers. 

At an exposed and vital position three officers were killed 
in quick succession. Another must go into the deadly breech. 
But Napoleon had only two aides left, Lavelette and Eugene 
Beauharnais. Eugene was filled with reckless daring, but his 
stepfather had seen him fall once when stunned by a shell. 
Turning to Lavelette, he said: "I don't want to send this 
boy and have him killed so young. His mother has entrusted 
him to me. You know what life is. Go!" 

The sun was setting on the red day, when the Turkish re- 
inforcements were seen rowing ashore in their small boats. 
The siege had come to its last stage and several hundred 
French broke into the town where they fought their way to 
the garden of Dejezzar. There they looked upon the walls 
of "the Butcher's" harem, the prison house of his eighteen 
white wives; but in a few minutes the brave men in the gar- 
den were headless corpses. 

This wild charge was led by General Lannes, who was 
brought to the earth by a shot through his neck. A company 
of his soldiers bore him back to safety, but with a wound that 
caused him to carry his head to one side the rest of his days. 

For twenty-flve hours the fighting lasted. In the last at- 
tack, when the spearheads on the standards of France and 
Turkey were locked, Napoleon stood with Arrighi by his side 
until a shell swept down his fellow Corsican. With anxious 
eyes he was watching Kleber's great shock of bushy hair in 
the thick of the hand-to-hand combat, and listening to his 
tremendous voice as it rose above the barbarous yells of a 
thousand newly landed janissaries. 

Soon Napoleon saw Kleber stop. The French column 
ceased to move forward. It paused a moment, and then re- 
coiled in a wild rout before the victorious Turks. 



HIS FIRST RETREAT 105 

The new Alexander had lost the empire of the east. A 
little town, "that miserable mudhole," as he called it, had 
barred Napoleon's path to the conquest of the Orient. All 
his life he murmured, "I missed my fortune at St. Jean 
d'Acre" — "the grain of sand that undid me." 

Folding his tent like the Arab he silently stole away in 
the night. But a messenger from the exultant Sidney Smith 
overtook him with this taunting letter: "Could you have 
thought that the poor prisoner in the temple, an unfortu- 
nate for whom you refused even for a moment to give your- 
self any concern, would compel you in the midst of the sand 
of Syria to raise the siege of a miserable, almost defenceless, 
town?" At the same time the British sailor was boasting 
in his report to London that "the plain of Nazareth is the 
boundary of Bonaparte's extraordinary career.''' 

Entering the ironclad Gate of Nazareth through the double 
walls of the town of Acre, one encounters, to-day, nothing 
more warlike than a drove of camels with a few begging lepers 
and cripples in the vestibule of the town. The way to the 
ramparts is through a maze of stone and through narrow, 
twisted, vaulted, but surprisingly clean, old streets, bazar 
lined. 

Looking seaward from the ramparts not a ship is to be seen 
in port. For when the Moslems in their fanatical frenzy 
tore down the great city of the Crusaders they filled the an- 
cient harbour with the ruins, and now Haifa has all the com- 
merce of the region. - 

Acre is only a petrified town, with a population perhaps 
of 12,000, all fast asleep, but still talking a good deal in 
their sleep. Down at a corner of the wall rises the light- 
house on the foundations of the Philistine temple of Beelze- 
bub. On the opposite wall the Tour Maudite was built with 
Judas' thirty pieces of silver! But Dejezzar's tower is the 
loftiest of all in Acre. It is the minaret of the mosque which 
that pious old butcher reared to Allah on lines of his own 
designing, and it must in fairness be admitted that he was as 
clever an architect as ever cut a throat. 

There is to be seen from the roof of the monastery of the 



106 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Franciscan fathers, a pretty panorama — including the Mount 
of Eichard Coeur de Lion and Napoleon's headquarters out 
in Dejezzar's country villa. In a monastery of the Greek 
faith is a rare monument of the Napoleonic siege. It is a 
memorial tablet to that Major Oldfield of the British marines, 
whose daring charges in the sorties against the French moved 
Napoleon to admiration and at last to bury him with full mili- 
tary honours, as the inscription duly records. 

There are few Christians in Acre and it is said that even 
these do not venture to show themselves in the streets at the 
season of Kamadan. Tourists are a rarity, there being no 
hotel and nothing but a vast, cheerless eastern caravansary, 
a khan. 

But the Sultan has a large and crowded boarding house at 
Acre for the special accommodation of those who disturb the 
repose of the Sublime Porte. This is a stockade rather than 
a prison, and behind it may be seen an array of picturescpie 
conspirators as terrible looking as any operatic stage ever 
presents. 

Far up the side of Mt. Carmel, at the other side of the 
bay of Acre, is the big Carmelite monastery which served Na- 
poleon as a military hospital. When he retreated, he left 
under guard at the monastery all who were too sick to accom- 
pany his army on its long, hard march. According to a 
local legend, these numbered 2000 and all were massacred by 
Dejezzar. But by the records of history only a few soldiers 
really were left there. 

The Carmelites to-day are a little Christian garrison in the 
land of Islam. In the course of the centuries, they have seen 
their home destroyed seven or eight times by the foes of the 
cross. The silent, cloistered precincts, tenanted now by only 
twenty-one monks, seem like the deserted halls of a big sum- 
mer hotel out of season. The monastery was long closed to 
the monks after Napoleon's retreat. When more than thirty 
years after the slaughter of the helpless, they were permitted 
to return, they gathered and deposited in a cave, the bones of 
the dead. Afterward the remains of the poor boys of France 
found their last resting place in the pretty garden before the 



HIS FIRST RETREAT 107 

monastery, and the sailors of a passing French warship 
erected a memorial stone with an iron cross among the palms 
in "the vineyard of God." 

Napoleon's 400-mile retreat from Acre down the Syrian 
coast, across the plains of Palestine and the desert of El Tih, 
in a tropic summer, was an anticipation in miniature of the 
retreat from Moscow. It was the last time he was destined 
to turn his back to an enemy until his flight over another 
desert, a desert of snow in a Russian winter ! In that first 
retreat he lost the empire of the east, in the second he was 
to lose the empire of the west. 

On his return march to Egypt he ordered all the horses to 
be given over to the sick and wounded. A stricken grenadier 
hesitated lest he might soil a handsome saddle, but the Gen- 
eral-in-chief said, "Mount! There is nothing too good for a 
brave soldier." An ordnance man inquiring which horse 
the commander wished to reserve for himself, Napoleon, re- 
plied with a blow from his whip, "Every one afoot; myself 
first of all." 

The fields were fired to cut off pursuers, but a few Syrians 
and the Arabs of Samaria lurking behind the stones and 
bushes on the hillsides peppered the fleeing French. Stung 
by that bushwhacking to an exasperated and mutinous tem- 
per, some soldiers forgot the obligations of humanity toward 
their sick and helpless comrades, and angry murmurs arose 
against them for delaying the retreat. 

Arrived at Jaffa, many of the garrison that Napoleon had 
left there in his advance on Acre were found in the hospital, 
some with "the plague." Those who were not plague- 
stricken were panic-stricken in the presence of the hideous 
malady. To arouse them from their despair, Napoleon went 
among them and there is a disputed story of his touching a 
plague patient to inspire the courage of the terrified inmates 
of the hospital. 

"In a few hours the Turks will be here," he repeated to the 
unfortunates as he moved along. "Let all those who have 
the strength rise and come with us. They shall be carried on 
litters and horses." All but about fifty, perhaps all but 



108 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

twenty-five, struggled up and swelled the numbers of the 
helpless that were already burdening the retreating column. 

Napoleon was charged for a long time with having adopted 
the principle of euthanasia toward those who were too feeble 
to rise from their beds and accompany him, and of having 
directed the apothecary to administer to them a fatal dose of 
laudanum. Bourrienne says he did, but Marmont, Andre- 
ossi, and other witnesses testify that he did not. Sidney 
Smith himself tells of finding the French sick still alive three 
days after the army left Jaffa. The weight of judgment now 
is that Napoleon restrained the instinctive promptings of 
nature, and, observing the scruples of our civilisation, did 
nothing to hasten the end of that little band of soldiers, but 
left them to the tortures of their disease and the tortures of 
their fears in the pest hospital at Jaffa. 

For nine hot summer days the army carried its sick and 
wounded over the desert into Egypt. The mirage, that 
cruel trick of nature, lured the soldiers to cooling waters that 
vanished at their approach. Maddened by heat and thirst, 
some threw down the litters of the sick, and killed themselves 
before the eyes of Napoleon. 

Yet, with flags flying and bands playing, the sadly reduced 
Army of Syria, as if in triumph, entered the Bab el Nasir, 
"the gate of victory," at Cairo. "I have razed the palace of 
Dejezzar and the ramparts of Acre," Napoleon proclaimed 
to the Egyptians; "not a stone remains upon another." 
Bourrienne looked up in amazement as his chief dictated that 
bulletin, but only to be chided for his ingenuousness: "My 
dear fellow, you are a simpleton. You do not understand 
this business." 

In a month the pursuing Turks were upon him to challenge 
even his refuge in Egypt from the disaster in Syria. A 
British fleet protected the landing of a large Turkish army 
on the sandy promontory of Aboukir where the French, by a 
rapid movement, caught them and penned them up. Of the 
15,000 Turks who entered the battle there, 9000 are said to 
have found their graves in the sands or in the waters. Abou- 



HIS FIRST RETREAT 109 

kir had avenged Acre, and the victory served to eclipse the 
retreat from Syria. 

While making some arrangements with Sidney Smith un- 
der a flag of truce after the battle, Napoleon sent him a chest 
of coffee and a case of brandy. In return for these gifts, 
Smith sent him a batch of European newspapers, only six 
weeks old. "Heavens," Napoleon exclaimed, as he read one 
of the papers, "the fools have lost Italy. All the fruits of 
our victories are gone. I must leave Egypt." 

The truth is he had wished to leave ever since he came. 
From the day Nelson sank the French fleet he had been no 
more than a prisoner in a desert. The bad news from home 
only determined him to hasten his long meditated attempt to 
make a wild dash to France and to his destiny. 

Fooling Smith and his scouts, he stole aboard a vessel in 
the night as she lay off a lonely desert shore. With 500 men 
and a few pieces of artillery on four frigates, and with less 
than $3500 in his chest, he set sail. The Army of Egypt was 
left under the command of Kleber and abandoned to its in- 
evitable doom. 

Since Napoleon could not be an Alexander in the east he 
might yet be a Charlemagne in the west — if fortune did not be- 
tray him as he dodged through a British blockade of the 
Mediterranean so close that a letter seldom passed. For six 
weeks he was the sport of the winds and was fairly blown 
into the harbour of Ajaccio. But Ajaccio was no longer the 
port of his dreams and his ambitions. At the first favouring 
breeze he sailed away, never again to smell the scented fields 
of his youth or look on his native mountains. 



CHAPTER XIV 

RULER OF FRANCE 

1799-1800 AGE 30 

THE people of the pretty little port of Frejus on the 
Mediterranean Riviera, sixty miles east of Toulon, 
awoke of an October morning in the year 1799 to the 
astonishing news that Napoleon was entering their harbour. 
All France supposed him to be penned up in Egypt. But he 
had made a safe run of nearly fifty days through the British 
blockade. "Had he fallen from heaven," Savary tells us, 
"his appearance would not have created more surprise and 
enthusiasm." 

Napoleon himself did not dream of the frenzied welcome 
that awaited him. On the contrary, he was fearful of a long 
detention in quarantine. When the townspeople, frantic with 
joy, swarmed out in boats and surrounded his ship, his com- 
panions shouted a warning to keep at a safe distance as the 
vessel had come from the plague-infected Orient. But the 
people roared, "We prefer the plague to the Austrians." 
For while Napoleon had been absent, the conquering soldiers 
of Austria had obliterated his victories in Italy, and the in- 
habitants of southern France were in terror of an invasion by 
the white coats. 

As with the population of Frejus, so it was with the French 
people as a whole. They preferred any evils Napoleon might 
bring to the evils already upon them. His journey from 
Frejus was a triumphant progress. Everywhere along his 
drive of 600 miles Napoleon was hailed as the rescuer of the 
Republic. 

Every town through which he passed gave him an enthusi- 

110 



RULER OF FRANCE 111 

astic reception, but none, we may be sure, touched the same 
emotions as Valence when she welcomed back the melancholy, 
almost suicidal sub lieutenant, who only a few years before 
had haunted her lanes and garrets. At the gate of the town 
he was greeted by Mile. Bou, and her former lodger gave 
her an Indian shawl and a silver compass. For this favourite 
of fortune ever retained at least one simple quality, a recol- 
lection of all who touched his life in its plainer days and 
a desire to draw them after him as he sped up the heights 
of fame. 

Napoleon had hastened from Egypt with an ambition to be 
the saviour of the country from military disasters in Italy. 
He really had no idea that the time had already come for 
him to take his place in France, no idea that already "the 
pear was ripe," as he had been in the habit of saying while 
musing on the future. But he found he had now only to 
shake the tree to bring down the fruit. 

France was not fearing foreign armies so much as the 
plotting factions at home, who forever kept the country be- 
tween the two horns of the dilemma, the return of the Bour- 
bons or the return of the Terror. The day Napoleon arrived 
in Paris nearly every plotter began an attempt to draw him 
into his own particular plot. He did not have to conspire. 
He had only to choose among the conspiracies already hatched 
before he landed on the shore of France. 

In the end he selected the Sieves brand of revolution. 
This former cleric was a member of the Directory of five 
members, which held the executive power, while the council 
of ancients and the council of the five hundred formed the 
upper and lower houses of the legislative body. The Sieyes 
plot called for the assembling of those two houses in an ex- 
traordinary session at an early hour in the morning, before 
the city should be astir. The ancients, whose leaders were 
favourable to a change, were to declare that Paris was in dan- 
ger of a Terrorist uprising, appoint Napoleon to the com- 
mand of the military forces for the protection of the capital 
and adjourn the legislative sessions to the quiet and security 
of St. Cloud. 



112 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

In the midst of the panic thus fomented Sieyes and a fel- 
low-conspirator in the Directory were to resign and the re- 
maining directors were to be frightened into retiring, while 
the legislature at St. Cloud was to be hastened into establish- 
ing a new government with a new constitution. Sieyes pro- 
posed to handle the politicians and leave to Napoleon the 
control of the army officers, who naturally rallied around 
him in unquestioning loyalty when they saw him preparing 
to act. 

Like everything with which Napoleon had to do, the revo- 
lution moved according to a nicely arranged schedule. All 
his trusted companions in arms gathered at his house in the 
Rue de la Victoire at six o'clock on a November morning, 
when the general in command of the city, a most vital per- 
sonage, burst in with a demand to be informed what it was 
all about. This was Lefebre, the husband of the former 
laundress, the Mme. Sans Gene of the stage and the novel. 
That ex-sergeant was too hot-headed a republican to have 
been approached in cold blood and told the secret in advance. 

"Lefebre," cried Napoleon, "you, one of the pillars of the 
Republic, will you leave it to perish at the hands of the law- 
yers? Here is the sword I wore at the Pyramids; I give it 
to you as a pledge of my confidence." 

1 ' Let us throw the lawyers into the river, ' ' roared the fierce 
republican as he fondled his new toy. 

The subtle Sieyes now sent word that he had played his 
part with the ancients, whereupon Napoleon galloped to the 
Tuileries and took command. Once more Paris stood in the 
presence of the "man on horseback." 

In accordance with the plans, the legislative bodies met 
the next morning out at St. Cloud in the suburban palace 
of the old kings, where Napoleon anxiously waited in a near-by 
apartment for the schedule of the revolution to be observed. 
With the slow hours of delay, he grew increasingly impatient 
and angry. It was his first experience with a legislative 
body that pretended to any independence of his own will. 

Fairly beside himself at last, he rushed into the council 
of the five hundred. This body was not in the plot and the 



RULER OF FRANCE 113 

sight of the soldiers accompanying the young general in- 
furiated the red-gowned council. Nor would it be stilled by 
its president, Lucien Bonaparte, who, as a compliment to his 
brother, had been elected to the chair. 

Councillors rushed upon Napoleon and grabbing the in- 
vader of their sanctuary by the collar of his grey coat and 
denouncing him as a traitor and dictator, they shook him as 
a dog shakes a rat. Although history doubts if any weapon 
was drawn on him, Napoleon cried in the midst of the noisy 
melee: "They mean to assassinate me." Thereupon the 
god of war fell like a fainting woman into the arms of his 
grenadiers. 

"Outlaw him! Outlaw him!" The council hall resounded 
with that sinister cry, which had sent many a man to the 
guillotine, ' ' Hors la loi ! Hors la loi ! " 

Napoleon gathered his wits as he determined no longer 
to waste his time in words but to return to his native 
element. The grenadiers under Murat and Leclerc were or- 
dered to clear the hall of the five hundred. Forward ! 
March ! The drums rolled as the soldiers entered. And the 
councillors, crying "Vive la Republique, " jumped out the 
windows. 

The Republic was no more ; it had jumped out the window. 

With a mere fragment of the broken up five hundred, only 
thirty members, Lucien opened a new session at nine o 'clock in 
the evening. Measures were quickly concerted with the 
complaisant ancients, whereby the old government was 
formally done to death and a provisional Consulate of the 
three conspirators, Sieyes, Ducos and Bonaparte, was estab- 
lished. 

The scene of that memorable but bloodless revolution re- 
mains one of the favoured sights of the environs of Paris. 
The terrace of St. Cloud looks down upon the Seine, shining 
like silver in the sun. Over back of a hill which the horizon 
touches, lies Versailles, where the Great Revolution was born 
in the tennis court. There was its cradle; St. Cloud is its 
grave. And off against the heights of Montmartre glistens 
the dome of the Invalides ! A big grey fortress still crowns 



114 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

the towering Mt. Valerien. That was the last stronghold of 
France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. The Ger- 
mans were at St. Cloud, too, and the French guns on Mt. 
Valerien shot the chateau to pieces. After the war, its 
ruined walls were torn down, not one stone being left upon 
another, and now the grass is green and the flowers bloom 
where the palace of the Bourbons and the Bonapartes stood. 
As Napoleon seized the helm of the ship of state, he an- 
nounced to France and the world, "I am the Revolution!" 
In truth, he was its son and heir, the sole legatee ! Out of 
all that forest of pikes came his sword alone ; out of that babel 
of sound and fury one clear, commanding voice ; out of that 
multitude of thoughts and purposes and plans one powerful 
will ; out of that era of dreams there issued this reality^ 

In the eyes of France, the Revolution had not been over- 
thrown ; it was embodied in Napoleon. With a sense of peace 
and justice, the exhausted nation reposed in his strong arms. 
Mathieu Dumas tells us that he "did not injure liberty, as 
it did not exist. He strangled the monster of anarchy and 
saved France." 

Chaos vanished before his frown. The hateful law of hos- 
tages was repealed and he went in person to throw open the 
prison doors of the temple. Imprisoned or banished priests, 
who had taken the republican oath, received the freedom of 
the country. The national securities rose from twelve to 
twenty francs in five days. 

The masses and the classes alike welcomed the advance 
agent of prosperity. The banks trustingly opened their 
strong boxes to him, and an individual citizen came forward 
with a loan of $100,000 to a government that had lacked the 
money to pay the expenses of a courier to its army in Italy. 
In a month there was a new constitution, which provided 
that Napoleon should be First Consul for ten years, with full 
executive power and a salary of $100,000 a year. The Second 
and Third Consuls were left almost as powerless as the Vice- 
president of the United States, and were retained only to dis- 
guise the one-man despotism. The people continued in pos- 
session of manhood suffrage, but were removed as far as pos- 



RULER OF FRANCE 115 

sible from the control of the government. The 5 000 000 
men of voting age in the country were to choose 500,000 per- 
sons, who m turn, were to choose 50,000 and finally they were 
to choose 5000. From these 5000 notables, all the offices were 
to be filled. 

There were to be a council, a senate, a tribunate, and a 
legislature. The Consuls were to appoint the council and 
a majority of senators, after which these latter were them- 
selves to complete the composition of the senate, which 
finally, was to choose from the notables the members of the 
tribunate and the legislature. No one was to be directlv 
elected by the people. 

The council, presided over by the First Consul, was to 
propose all laws to the tribunate, where they were to be de- 
bated and then referred to the legislature— " a deaf and 
dumb assembly"— which was to adopt or reject the proposals 
m silence, after which the laws were to go before the senate 
also a mute body, which had only the power to veto legisla- 
tion. & 

In two months this elaborate scheme of government was in 
lull operation, and in less than three weeks after the legisla- 
tive bodies had assembled, the judiciary and the entire^ov- 
ernment of France down to the smallest municipality were 
completely reorganised; a new system of taxation was de- 
vised and the great Bank of France established. At the same 
time Napoleon brought to an end eight years of civil war in 
Vendee and elsewhere in Brittany and Normandy, where a 
royalist and Catholic population had made a stubborn re- 
sistance to the Revolution and the Republic. Peace and pros- 
perity were the twin blessings received by France in a 
crowded three months. Then an election was held and the 
people ratified the new constitution. 

Napoleon and Josephine installed themselves in the palace 
ot the Luxembourg immediately after the coup d'etat at St 
Uoud. The directors had been living in that palace and now 
the Consuls supplanted them. How few were the years since 
the Luxembourg had been the prison of Josephine's first hus- 
band, when it was crowded with the victims of the Terror and 



116 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

she herself was a prisoner in the Carmelite convent a little 
way down the street ! 

But the Tuileries, not the Luxembourg;, was the palace of 
the kings. It was not from idle vanity that Napoleon longed 
to move over the Seine and live in that home of royalty. 
For the same purpose that the chief of a provisional govern- 
ment in the United States might wish to occupy the White 
House, the First Consul desired to possess himself of the tra- 
ditional seat of power and authority in France. 

Such a change in quarters, however, might awaken the 
mob that he himself had watched seven years before while it 
drove Louis XVI from the throne of his fathers. As he pon- 
dered the question, the news came of the death of Washing- 
ton. He seized upon the event to distract the attention of the 
republicans from his despotic designs. Proclaiming a period 
of mourning and holding a memorial festival, he evoked the 
shade of the immortal friend of liberty and enemy of tyrants 
as a screen for his entry into the abiding place of the Bour- 
bon monarchs. Thither he drove behind six white horses, and 
wearing a magnificent sabre, gifts of the Emperor of Ger- 
many. As he passed within the gate he could have read on 
one of the stone posts this boast of the Republic: 



The 10th of August, 1792, 

ROYALTY IN FRANCE 

IS ABOLISHED AND SHALL 

NEVER BE RE-ESTABLISHED. 



He permitted the sign to remain on the gate post, but as 
he walked over the great palace, he found some liberty caps 
painted in red on the walls. "Get rid of those things," he 
commanded; "I do not like to see such rubbish." 

Turning to his secretary, he said :" To be at the Tuileries, 
Bourrienne, is not all. We must stay here. Who, in heaven's 
name, has not already inhabited this place? Ruffians, con- 



RULER OF FRANCE 117 

ventionalists ! But, stop, there is your uncle's shop. Was 
it not from those windows I saw the Tuileries besieged and 
the good Louis XVI carried off? Be assured, they will not 
come here again!" 



J 



CHAPTER XV 

CROSSING THE ALPS 

1800 AGE 30 

THERE is a little cottage at Bourg St. Pierre, the tiny- 
Swiss hamlet that lies on a shelf more than half-way 
up the snowy side of the Great St. Bernard. Its un- 
painted walls have been stained by wind and rain a deep, 
rich brown like all the rest of the fifty or sixty habitations 
in that rude and lonely Alpine village. 

Yet it has its distinguishing mark, and every one in the 
place calls it "The House with Three Windows." But the 
villagers have found that for some reason or other the 
stranger is more impressed if they point it out as "The 
House of the Guide of Napoleon." 

St. Pierre also boasts an inn with a significant name, the 
Hotel au Dejeuner de Napoleon. There the curious traveller 
may sit in the veritable chair and at the veritable table of 
the historic breakfast and listen to the story of it from the 
lips of the granddaughter of the innkeeper who served it, un- 
til he is so distracted by the feast of memory she spreads be- 
fore him he can hardly do single-minded justice to her wor- 
thy omelet. The old pictures of the grandparents and their 
immortal guest hanging on the panelled walls and the china 
and pewter accessories of that dejeuner 113 years ago are a 
banquet in themselves. 

As the granddaughter of the old innkeeper presides now 
over the Hotel au Dejeuner de Napoleon, so a grandson of 
the guide dwells in the Maison du Guide de Napoleon. To- 
gether they industriously polish and keep shining the 
memory of the great little man, all buttoned up to the chin 

118 



CROSSING THE ALPS 119 

in a big grey overcoat, who rode out of St. Pierre on a mule 
one May morning in the year 1800, a Swiss peasant walking 
beside him. 

The rider was the First Consul of France, who in six 
months had restored peace at home, but had failed to obtain 
peace abroad. As it is said of a man who takes a disputed 
land title that "he has bought a lawsuit," so Napoleon in as- 
suming charge of the French government took upon him- 
self an irrepressible conflict with the other nations of Europe. 

The Revolution had hoisted its tricoloured flag on the castles 
of conquered lands, and it was not for him to haul it down, 
to surrender what the French had purchased with their blood. 
Thus the Napoleonic wars, in their early stages at least, were 
the inevitable sequence of the wars of the Revolution. 

Austria had yielded to Napoleon three years before, but 
not until he had whipped five of her armies. "While he was 
before the walls of the far-away town of Acre, the French 
ambassadors to the congress of peace at Rastadt were mur- 
dered by Austrians, and Austria rushing into a new war, took 
from France all the ground he had won for her in Italy. 

Aided by a subsidy from Great Britain, the Austrians were 
preparing now to invade France herself and dictate terms of 
peace to the French people from their own capital. An Aus- 
trian army of 120,000 men had marched across Germany and 
around the upper end of the long Alpine wall which defends 
the approaches to France; but only to be hurled back from 
the Rhine to the Danube by a great French army under Gen- 
eral Moreau. 

Another Austrian army of nearly 120,000 men in Italy, 
however, had caught a little French force under General 
Massena and shut it up within the walls of Genoa. Its sur- 
render was a question only of days. Then the Austrians 
would be free to march around the lower end of the Alpine 
wall, where its base is washed by the waters of the Mediter- 
ranean, and enter southern France. They were confident of 
victory and all Europe seemed to share their confidence. 

Napoleon could not send a great army against the enemy in 
Italy as he had in Germany, because the Austrian soldiers and 



120 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

the British gunboats together could easily defend the narrow 
path along the mountainous shore. Apparently there was 
nothing for him to do but wait and accept battle on French 
soil. He confirmed that general view of the situation by 
noisily proclaiming the formation of the Army of Reserve at 
Dijon, ostensibly for the purpose of meeting the invaders in 
the Valley of the Ehone. 

But the spies of the enemy and the representatives of the 
foreign press, who rushed to Dijon, found only the skeleton 
of a military body there. This exposure of his feeble re- 
sources brought upon Napoleon the derisive laughter of the 
nations. His boasted Army of the Reserve was the butt of 
the caricaturists and the jest of London and Vienna. 

The other governments, however, did not know that his ex- 
traordinary success in hastily patching up a peace with the 
revolted provinces of western France and his general paci- 
fication of the country had, for the first time since the Revo- 
ultion began, released for the foreign service all the military 
strength of the Republic. He needed no army to defend his 
government at home. Even in the garrisons of Paris he had 
only 2300 men, a much smaller force than was employed to 
preserve the peace in London herself. 

Nor did his enemies know that while his phantom army at 
Dijon was contributing to the gaiety of nations, a regiment 
was quietly forming here, a brigade there in various parts of 
France and stealthily marching by itself toward Switzer- 
land. Its own officers had no idea of its real destination. 
Even the minister of war was not in the secret. 

As those mysterious and mystified commands, coming by 
many roads, met on the banks of Lake Geneva at Lausanne 
they were amazed to find themselves an army — the real Army 
of the Reserve — under the command of Napoleon himself, 
who marched them squarely against the Alps at Martigny. 
He was going to steal up the Alpine wall and jump down on 
the unsuspecting Austrians! 

Magnificent highways run over the Alps to-day and luxuri- 
ous express trains run under them — it is hardly more than 
an hour from Martigny itself to Italy by the great Simplon 



CROSSING THE ALPS 121 

tunnel. But there was not a wagon track for Napoleon. 
Among the mere foot trails over the steep passes, he chose the 
steepest of all, the Great St. Bernard, because it was the 
shortest and would take him closest to the rear of the Aus- 
trians. 

As another youth with the same sad brow and flashing blue 
eye, who bore mid snow and ice a banner with a strange de- 
vice, was warned by the prudent against the roaring torrent 
and the awful avalanche of the St. Bernard, the army engi- 
neers, returning from their inspection, shook their cautious 
heads at the young First Consul and echoed, "Try not the 
pass ! ' ' 

' ' Difficult, granted, ' ' he replied to the engineers ; ' ' but is it 
possible?" They admitted the possibility. "Then let us 
start!" He did not cry " Excelsior ! " But no doubt he had 
his secret watchword — "Empire!" 

If Charlemagne had led an army over the St. Bernard 1000 
years before, and Hannibal had crossed the Alps 2000 years 
before with troops reared beneath a tropic sun and encum- 
bered with a train of elephants, why should Napoleon be 
daunted? "An army can pass at all times," he said, "wher- 
ever two men can set their feet." 

For nearly a week he sent his army out of Martigny, a di- 
vision a day, to scale the 6600-foot wall that towers above the 
town and from its top to let themselves down 6000 feet into 
the valley of Aosta on the other side. For two months he 
had been preparing for the march. All the necessary sup- 
plies had been collected by him as secretly as he had assembled 
the army itself. His troops marching in a few hours from 
the warm sunshine of the lowlands into the ice and snow 
of the sunless gorges might succumb to the change and the 
cold; he had laid in an immense stock of clothing and shoes 
and he saw to it that every man was properly clad and shod. 
As the day grew warmer and the snow began to melt, the 
perils from avalanches would increase; he ordered each 
division to be at the foot of the mountain and ready to start 
before two o'clock in the morning, thus making the most dan- 
gerous part of the passage in the night. To fortify the weaker 



122 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

for the crossing and to resuscitate them at the end of their 
arduous tramp, he set up hospitals on either side of the moun- 
tains. The line of march, starting in an almost barren 
region, soon left all vegetation behind; he arranged for the 
army to carry every morsel of food and forage for men and 
beasts, sixty or seventy pounds being loaded on the back of 
each man. 

The road from Martigny to the valley of Aosta in Italy is 
more than forty miles long. But from Bourg St. Pierre there 
was no road at all in Napoleon's day, only a path up to the 
summit of the St. Bernard, eight miles, and then for another 
seven or eight miles down to St. Rhemy on the Italian side. 
Nothing could go over that part of the pass on wheels. But 
the artillerymen found a gang of expert workmen at St. 
Pierre ready to take their gun carriages and ammunition 
wagons to pieces and pack the parts, properly numbered, on 
the backs of mules. 

Sledges had been provided for the cannon, but they proved 
to be useless. Thereupon fir trees were cut down and their 
trunks split in two and hollowed out. The gun was laid in 
one-half of the hollowed log, while the other half was fastened 
over it as a covering. 

It was found that even this could not be hauled up the pass 
by the mules. The peasant mountaineers were called in and 
Napoleon offered to pay them 1200 francs ($240) for each 
cannon they transported. But it took 100 men two days to 
drag a gun over the path. After a few gangs had attempted 
it, the peasants gave up the task. 

Napoleon finally appealed to his soldiers and they threw 
themselves at the Alps as if they were an enemy in arms, 
while bands and drummers and buglers, posted at the hard- 
est points, played the stirring tunes of the Revolution. Pa- 
triotism did what gold could not do. 

As each division of troops mounted to the top of the pass 
and arrived at the Hospice of St. Bernard it was greeted by 
the monks, who having laid in abundant supplies at Napo- 
leon's request and expense, gave the soldiers a delightful sur- 
prise, every man receiving bread and cheese and wine. Down 



CROSSING THE ALPS 123 

at St. Rhemy, where the path ended on the Italian side and 
the road began, not only was a hospital set up but all man- 
ner of craftsmen were assembled. If a strap on a mule was 
broken, saddlers were there ready to repair it, while other 
workmen put together the gun carriages and ammunition 
wagons and remounted the cannon as fast as they arrived. 

Napoleon stayed at the lowland home of the monks of St. 
Bernard, the monastery which still stands by the old church 
in Martigny, until he had seen to the last detail and de- 
spatched the last division. His battle against the Alps was 
won, and as he rode out of Bourg St. Pierre, after the now- 
celebrated dejeuner, he seemed to have no more serious in- 
terests than the curiosity of an idle traveller. 

As his mule plodded up the heights by the tumbling, rush- 
ing Valsorey, he listened to the roaring and crashing noises 
that broke the silence of the lonely pass and the musical call 
of the herdsmen from peak to peak. Always charmed by the 
sound of a bell he hearkened to the loud tinkling of the big 
Alpine cowbells as they rang out above the singing torrent. 
This pretty picture has been transferred by Emerson from 
the pages of history to the pages of poetry and philosophy in 
his "Each and All:" 

The heifer that lows in. the upland farm, 

Far heard, lows not thine ear to charm; 

The sexton, tolling his bell at noon, 

Dreams^ not that great Napoleon 

Stops his horge, and lists with delight 

Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height; 

Nor knowest thou what argument 

Thy life to thy neighbour's creed has lent. 

If the sexton did not deem that the great Napoleon paused 
entranced by the music of his noontime bell, so even the moun- 
taineer who walked beside the mule of the little great man in 
the big grey coat did not dream that he was guiding Napoleon 
to his destiny. Peasant and ruler chatted on easy terms as 
they toiled together up the gorges of the St. Bernard, while 
the stranger questioned and the countryman explained his 
little world. Tempted to confidences, the guide told of his 



124 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

sweetheart in the valley and how poverty had baffled their 
mating, of his humble life and modest ambitions. 

"What above all things desirest thou most at this instant 
to make thee happy?" the traveller asked. 

"That mule you are riding," the peasant replied without 
need of hesitating. 

Not only did he get his wish and return to his neighbours 
the proud and happy owner of the coveted animal, but 
not long afterward an agent of the French minister to 
Switzerland sought him out with a gift beyond his dreams. 
By the command of the First Consul of France, the agent 
came to arrange for the purchase or erection of a house and 
to provide the means for the guide's marriage. 

The little great man's activities as a matchmaker and pro- 
moter of weddings have fallen under the censure of his- 
torians. But surely they must all forgive him this time. 

That little, unpainted, weather-stained cottage in a Swiss 
hamlet, the House with Three Windows at Bourg St. Pierre, 
that simple monument of the gratitude of Napoleon, has out- 
lasted his magnificent palaces and even the splendid edifice 
of his great Empire. The Tuileries and St. Cloud are gone, 
but the Maison du Guide de Napoleon still stands and shelters 
the grateful posterity of the guide. Mighty works wrought 
by the power of Napoleon and dedicated to his glory have 
passed away, but a simple deed of kindness endures. 

A carriage road has taken the place of the rough trail 
Napoleon followed over the wild, deep ravine of the Valsorey, 
where the French army found its steepest climb ; through the 
forest of St. Pierre, where the trees make their final stand 
against the wintry desert of stone, and then on to the last in- 
habited house, the Cantine de Proz, where even man sur- 
renders to the arid heights. 

More than 1000 feet below the Hospice of St. Bernard is its 
outpost, the little stone hospitalet or refuge. Here and there 
a solitary tree rises from the stones to stand like a sentinel at 
his post, guarding the lowlands against the advance of desola- 
tion. In the drear Combe des Morts itself— the Valley of 
Death — beautiful Alpine flowers, hardiest dwellers in the 



CROSSING THE ALPS 125 

floral world, garland the shoulders of the mountain and fain 
would crown him. 

Even in early July, the shovelled road mounts between snow 
banks six and seven feet high to the little plain where the 
grey walls of the Hospice of St. Bernard rise out of the white 
earth in a cold haze toward a sombre sky, as melancholy a 
scene as can be imagined. An enclosed bridge connects 
two severely plain stone buildings, standing on either side 
of the road. One is the monastery and the other the Hotel 
St. Louis, a necessary refuge for the brothers in case of fire, 
and which also serves as a lodging for poor wayfarers and a 
shelter for the horses of travellers. 

It was in the depth of the dark ages that a young dreamer, 
St. Bernard de Menthon, quit a world filled with hate and war 
to set up the cross on the lofty and peaceful heights of the 
Alps as a beacon along the pilgrimage road to Rome, as a 
sanctuary for the storm-beaten wayfarer. Although the rail- 
roads and highroads under and over the Alpine chain have 
largely reduced the necessity for this rescue work in our time, 
gentle souls still hearken to the call of St. Bernard's cross 
and, leaving self and a world of selfish strife below, go up in 
the mountains to devote their lives to an ideal. 

In the chapel are two strange companions, a portrait of 
the peace-loving founder of the order and the sculptured 
monument of a war-loving youth. This is General Desaix, 
and the white marble memorial of him was set up by Napo- 
leon as a testimony to his admiration and regret for a brilliant 
young general, who crossed the Alps only to meet his death 
on the field of Marengo. Generations of monks have cher- 
ished the traditions of Napoleon 's hour of rest at the Hospice, 
and the goblet from which he drank is treasured to this day. 
As he came away from the monastery and proceeded past the 
lonely statue of St. Bernard on the bleak plain beyond the 
little lake, he saw a wonderful toboggan chute glistening in 
the Italian sun. It had been worn smooth by the thousands 
of soldiers who had seated themselves in the snow and slid 
down the steep mountain side. 

Following the example of his men, he himself took the 



126 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

toboggan and was fairly shot into Italy, where the Austrians 
were as surprised to see him descend upon them as if he had 
dropped from Mars with a parachute. 



CHAPTER XVI 
MARENGO LOST AND WON 

1800 AGE 30 

TWO months before he crossed the Alps, Napoleon 
lay on a big map of Italy, which had been spread on 
the floor of the Tuileries in Paris. As he studied the 
map he stuck pins in it, here and there, some of them tipped 
with red wax and the others with black. 

Bourrienne, who knelt on the map beside him, says that 
when Napoleon had finished this operation he asked, "Where 
do you think I shall beat Melas?" "How the devil should I 
know?" Bourrienne replied. 

"Why, look here, you fool," said the other man on the 
floor, "Melas is at Alessandria, with his headquarters. There 
he will remain until Genoa surrenders. Crossing the Alps 
here," and he pointed to a red pin at the Great St. Bernard, 
"I shall fall upon him, cut his communications and meet him 
there," pointing to a red pin at San Giuliano. "Poor M. de 
Melas, ' ' he chuckled ;, ' ' he will pass through Turin, fall back 
upon Alessandria, I shall cross the Po, overtake him on the 
road to Piacenza, on the plains of the Scrivia, and I shall 
beat him just there, just there ! ' ' 

It was in June, 1800, nearly three months after that re- 
ported forecast, when Bourrienne found himself watching 
from the height of San Giuliano the smoke of battle rising 
from the field of Marengo. Napoleon had crossed the Alps, 
cut the communications of General Melas, the Austrian com- 
mander in Italy, and now was meeting him in the valley 
below San Giuliano. 

The decisive battle came before either side was ready for it. 
Taken by surprise, Melas had been able to assemble of his 

127 



128 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

immense but widely scattered forces only about 30,000 men 
at Alessandria, when the French presented themselves be- 
fore the brick wall of that town, which is an important place 
sixty miles south of Milan. 

Napoleon, on his part, had neglected for once his adopted 
maxim that "God is always on the side of the heaviest bat- 
talions." He had tempted fate by so dispersing his army as 
to bring perhaps only 20,000 men to the field of action and 
only forty guns to meet the fire of the 200 Austrian guns. 

For five hours this small force had struggled to restrain the 
advance of the Austrians, when at ten o'clock Napoleon gal- 
loped upon the scene of battle for the first time. With him 
were his old Guides, now the Consular Guard, and from his 
shoulders floated the cloak which was destined to cover his 
coffin when it was borne to the willows at St. Helena. 

Nearly all the famous battlefields were appointed by nature 
and not by military strategists. "We hear of warriors select- 
ing fields of combat, but they only seek out the places chosen 
for them long ages before they were born, generally beside a 
stream or a hill. 

Looking down from the old legendary tower of Theodoric, 
the great Ostrogoth, which still rises among the orchard trees 
of Marengo, one sees a lazy little creek meandering over the 
broad plain that lies before the eastern gate of Alessandria. 
The plain is like a great football field, bordered on either side 
by hills that rise like the tiers of a grandstand, with the River 
Bormida washing the old walls of Alessandria at one end and 
the heights of San Giuliano rising at the other end of the 
gridiron, while the tiny rivulet Fontanone is the fifty-yard 
line. 

Across that mere brooklet the Battle of Marengo was 
fought. There, by the steep banks of a reedy ditch, the his- 
tory of Europe was decided for fifteen years. At two o'clock 
of a June afternoon it was decided favourably to Austria and 
adversely to France, for then Melas had crossed the creek and 
smashed Napoleon's army into fragments. Many of the 
French were in a rout, but others stubbornly contested 
the ground inch by inch as they slowly retreated over the 



MARENGO LOST AND WON 129 

plain. Lannes, falling back at the head of a small brigade, 
yielded only a mile in two hours. But at last the Consular 
Guard itself gave way under a blazing artillery fire. 

The Battle of Marengo was lost, and with it, Napoleon's 
chance for empire. A messenger hastily stole away to carry 
to the enemies of the First Consul in Paris the welcome news 
that fortune had deserted him. Revolutionary Paris need 
no longer fear his iron hand. 

Suffering from the heat and burdened with his seventy 
years — Austria persisted in her policy of sending old men to 
whip this Corsican youth — General Melas left the field of vic- 
tory for his headquarters in Alessandria. Having silenced 
all but five of the French cannon, it was time for the aged 
General to lie down and dictate a report, telling the Emperor 
at Vienna how he had slain the Goliath of the Revolution 
with the pebbles of the Brook Fontanone. 

Meanwhile Napoleon was sitting on the ground, behind the 
sheltering walls of the little village of Marengo. The Con- 
sular Guard was drawn up about him. His maps were spread 
beside him. But he was not looking at them, nor seemingly 
at his fleeing soldiers as they passed him. He did not lift his 
finger in an effort to rally them. His boldness seemed to 
have forsaken him, as he sat there beating up the dust with 
his riding whip. 

He still entertained a faint hope, however, that before the 
slow-going Austrians recovered from their victory and 
adopted measures for following it up, General Desaix, whom 
he had ordered elsewhere, might yet come to the rescue. 
While he waited and hoped, Savary, an aide-de-camp of 
Desaix, dashed up to report that his General, having heard 
the sound of battle, was hastening to the scene with his 5000 
men. 

Napoleon at once sprang into his saddle and spurred his 
white horse among his retreating troops, forming them in 
line again in front of San Giuliano. His cocked hat blew 
off, but he rode on bareheaded through the ranks, shouting: 
"My friends, we have fallen back far enough. Remember, 
soldiers, it is my habit to bivouac on the field of battle. ' ' 



130 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

As the sun was descending to the Alpine horizon the Aus- 
trians, with colours flying and bands playing, leisurely moved 
forward from Marengo. They were content merely to drive 
the enemy from the field, for to all the old generals of Europe 
war was only an interminable game of checkers, not a fight 
to a finish. On they went until they were within 100 paces 
of Desaix's force, but without seeing it through a field of high- 
standing wheat and the thick leaves of a vineyard that 
screened the French. 

Suddenly the hidden army sprang at the surprised Aus- 
trians, and out of the grain and the vines blazed a heavy mus- 
ketry fire. The line of white coats wavered, but quickly ral- 
lied. Soon, however, 600 French cavalry under young 
Kellermann dashed upon their flank and carried chaos among 
the Austrians. Their ranking officer and 6000 men were 
taken prisoners. 

The French line began to advance, and the victors of a few 
minutes before found themselves rolled back among the 10,000 
dead and wounded lying on the plain. The retreating white 
coats hurried past Marengo, jumped the creek and then ran 
for their lives to the bridges over the River Bormida, where 
it flows between Alessandria and the battlefield. When night 
fell there was not an Austrian in arms on the field of Marengo. 

Desaix had saved the day but he had been killed at the 
head of his column. "What a triumph this would have been 
if I could have embraced Desaix on the field of battle," the 
General-in-chief exclaimed. Then he added, with quickly ris- 
ing spirits, "Little Kellermann made a lucky charge. We 
are much indebted to him. You see what trifling circum- 
stances decide these affairs." 

On a field where his genius shone at its poorest, Napoleon 
reaped probably his greatest harvest of glory. Although he 
had correctly foretold the battle nearly three months, it 
found him unready and absent from the scene until the fight 
was more than half over. As he saw his army smashed and 
driven from the plain, he contrived no timely expedient, no 
brilliant exploit to turn the engulfing tide of disaster, and he 
was saved at last by Desaix and by Kellermann. 



MARENGO LOST AND WON 131 

Success came to him only as a stroke of luck. Yet it right- 
fully belonged to him, in accordance with the rules that gov- 
ern our world of chance. He had surmounted the Alps and 
placed himsef where luck could find him, where a few of 
Desaix s muskets and Kellermann's horses could win a great 

wh ^M ! e b f tlG ° f Mareng ° rea11 ^ was won in March 
when Napoleon lay on the floor of the Tuileries, sticking red 
pms and black into the map of Italy. 

Marengo is to-day the best cherished of all the fields of 
Napoleon s victories. His battle grounds lie generally in 
alien lands among conquered peoples, who naturally have not 
done much to commemorate his triumphs over them His 
Italian victories, however, were not won against Italians but 
against Austnans, and in the end United Italy slowly rose to 
independence from the battlefields of Napoleon, who only 
blazed the path for Victor Emmanuel. 

The last of these, the climax, was Marengo. He fondlv 
planned the erection of a monumental city there a citv of 
victories, with beautiful avenues bearing the names of his 
generals and adorned with temples and sculptures. But those 
castles of glory remained in the air, never emerging from his 
dreams into reality. Long after his bones were dust and his 
sword was rust, a patriotic Italian of Alessandria bought 
Marengo and made it a Napoleonic museum 

About all there was to the village when the battle immor- 
talised its name was an old roadside tavern, with its stables 
and sheds and its ancient tower, which legend ascribes to a 
palace erected there by Theodoric some 1400 years ago 
Against the stony sides of those structures the red tide of 
battle surged and the leaden hail pelted as the contending 
armies took and retook the sheltering walls Menai ^ 

The tavern still stands by the road, along which a rural 
trolley line now makes its way. Its sign, < < Albergo Marengo ' ' 
is covered with the scars of time if not of battle. The al- 
bergo is unchanged by the years, and one might say unswept 
by the generations that have come and gone since NapoTeon 
sat m its lee, beating up the dust with his riding whip But 
against its wall and behind an iron fence, with golden tipped 



132 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

pikes and lances and battle axes on top of it, there rises the 
monumental palace built by the Alessandrian citizen. 

Within this fence is the court of honour and a statue of 
the young First Consul, whose feet are planted on a block of 
red granite from the Alps which he crossed to write the name 
of Marengo on the list of his victories. The palace walls ris- 
ing behind and on one side of the court of honour are entirely 
covered with most amazing frescoes, depicting the spires and 
domes and arches, avenues, palaces, temples, and belvederes 
of Napoleon's dream city of victories, as they might have 
looked if his dream had come true. Out of this gorgeous 
fantasy, the victor floats at full length while victory crowns 
him with laurels, and Desaix, Kellermann and other generals 
are also portrayed. 

Back of the palace are the old tavern stable and sheds, still 
echoing to the imagination the moans of the poor wounded 
fellows who were carried there from the battlefield. A stage 
coach of the Empress Marie Louise has been brought from 
somewhere and in all its gaudiness is installed in a shabby 
barn. 

Within the silent, untenanted palace itself is a gorgeous 
gallery of the apotheosis, and there are also chambers lined 
with pistols, muskets, swords, sabres, knives, and all manner 
of rusty, murderous things raked in from the battlefield. 
The table on which Napoleon is said to have written his letter 
to the Emperor of Germany has been brought there, with the 
veritable quill, the veritable tin ink horn in which he dipped 
it, the veritable sand with which he dried his letter and the 
veritable receptacle for water in which he left the quill when 
he had finished. A high, slender-backed chair, like a piece 
of pulpit furniture, whereon he is reputed to have sat — and 
napped — is treasured in a glass case, and above it are a nobby 
chapeau and a sword and scabbard crossed. They belonged 
to Desaix, but presumably were not worn in the battle, for 
Savary records that ghouls had stolen everything on him and 
stripped him naked before his body was cold. 

Out in a pretty park — there are 260 acres in the reserva- 
tion — is a marble bust of the fallen General in the midst of a 



MARENGO LOST AND WON 133 

leafy solitude, his shoulders, chin, cheeks, and brow black with 
the scribbled Italian names of visitors. A lovely belvedere 
rises in the shade of great trees, an altar against its inner wall. 
Through an opening in the centre of the floor, a heap of bones 
surprises the gaze. 

There in that pit are gathered the relics of the slain in a 
common pile, where the boys of France and the boys of Aus- 
tria are mingling their dust as they mingled their blood in 
the creek on the plain. 

Out of the grave of that mute brotherhood of death, came 
peace, the first that a war-worn world had known since monar- 
chical Europe combined against the French Revolution eight 
years before. Austria was ready to lay down her arms at 
Napoleon's feet, but her ally, Great Britain, whose battlefield 
was the sea, had not felt the heavy hand of the conqueror. 
If she gave him peace on the water he would be able to rein- 
force his army in Egypt and keep his foothold in the east. 

The British, therefore, sent the Austrians an extra subsidy 
for the continuance of the campaign against France in Ger- 
many, which, however, was brought to a disastrous end by 
General Moreau in a great French victory at Hohenlinden in 
the December following Marengo. 

Napoleon now showed hardly less skill in the game of 
diplomacy than in the game of war. He made his moves like 
an adept chessman. He brought Austria to harder terms than 
he had imposed at Campo Formio three years before, closed 
an ugly quarrel with the United States, made a trade with 
Spain for Louisiana and promoted a feud between Russia and 
the Baltic powers against Great Britain, which broke out into 
a naval war, culminating in the Battle of Copenhagen. 

The British, with a population of 17,000,000, found them- 
selves abandoned and alone in the long struggle with France, 
which now numbered 40,000,000 people. Since the war be- 
gan in 1792, the expenditures of Great Britain had risen from 
$100,000,000 a year to $300,000,000; the income tax had 
been raised to ten per cent, and the national debt stood at 
$2,750,000,000. 

Beneath those accumulated burdens, England welcomed the 



134 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

relief that peace would bring;, although looking upon it as 
hardly more than a brief truce, an experimental peace, as her 
statesmen described it. She did not yield, however, until the 
French had lost Egypt and until she herself had little to lose 
from a breathing spell. 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE LAW GIVER 

IF Napoleon never had fought a battle, he would yet stand 
forth as one of the world's greatest statesmen. Where, 
indeed, shall we look for his peer in statecraft ? 
Laying aside his sword after the Battle of Marengo, he won 
in four years of peace, victories which deserve to be no less 
renowned than those of war, and which were far more en- 
during. Entering upon the Consulate in the true spirit of a 
patriot and servant of the people, the greatness and dory of 
his country were his ruling passion. "Ma belle France," as 
he fondly called her, was his mistress. . 

He would rather toil for the nation than sleep or eat He 
could work eighteen hours without resting. "I work all the 
time," he said to the official sluggards, "at dinner and at the 
theatre. ' 

Generally men are grown old and stale by the time they 
attain to power. It was this man's fortune while yet in the 
full flush of youthful enthusiasm to find himself the ruler of 
France. He held his councillors to their tasks from nine to 
five, with only fifteen minutes' intermission for eating, and 
again from ten at night until five in the morning. "Come 
come," he chided his exhausted helpers far in the°ni»ht "let 
us bestir ourselves. It is only two o'clock, and we must earn 
the money the French people pay us." If Bourrienne stole 
away to the theatre he had to come back to take up the day's 
duties again. 

Napoleon did not take time properly to undress for bed, but 
tore off his clothes and flung them about the room, hat, watch 
and all. He did not stop even to be shaved, but talked, read 
papers and kept on the move while under the razor of Con- 
stant, his valet. He held audiences while in the bathtub. 

His servants had to go into conference and agree upon 

135 



136 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

measures for getting him correctly dressed for state occasions. 
He refused to pause for sittings to the great Canova, whom 
he had summoned from Italy, but obliged the sculptor to 
study him while he lunched. 

And he would not spare the time to eat. A glass of hot 
water, in which he squeezed a lemon, sufficed for his break- 
fast. The table bored him, and his chef, never knowing when 
he would yield to the need of nourishment, kept his luncheon 
ready and waiting for him hour after hour, replacing the 
food in the oven as fast as it was cooked with a new supply. 
When he came at last he chose only one of nine or ten dishes 
and ignored the rest. He hardly knew what he ate. 

Often when he had stayed only ten minutes, even at dinner, 
he pushed his chair back and left the family and his guests at 
the table. Once when something troubled him, instead of 
springing up from the table as usual, he hurled it away from 
him, upsetting the dishes on the floor. 

When he wrote he did not take time to form the letters, but 
left half of them out of the longer words. "He writes like 
a cat scratching holes in a sheet of paper, ' ' his brother Joseph 
said. His thoughts outraced his quill, which he wiped on 
his white breeches, necessitating a fresh pair every morning. 
He insisted that "a man occupied with public business can- 
not practise orthography. His ideas must flow faster than 
his hand can trace." 

His dictation poured forth in a torrent, which brooked no 
interference and could not be turned back for the repetition 
of a sentence or a word. There was yet no shorthand system, 
and to keep up with him his scribes had to invent one of their 
own. While he dictated he strode up and down the room 
like a caged lion. If he sat down his tireless hand hacked at 
the arm of his chair with a penknife, or he dangled his legs 
from his secretary's table and rocked it so hard the poor man 
had still greater difficulty in making his notes. 

The infinite range of his interests and the tremendous dis- 
play of his energies stagger the imagination, and "surpassed 
human capacity," in the words of Taine, his severest critic in 
literature, while Emerson has said that "his achievement of 



THE LAW GIVER 137 

business was immense and enlarges the known powers of 
man." 

His ministers, overwhelmed by his instructions and pumped 
dry by his questioning, went from the Tuileries to their of- 
fices only to find on their desks a dozen more written inquiries 
from him. Lavallette said that "he governed more in three 
years than kings in 100 years." 

He boasted that he took more pleasure in reading official 
reports "than any young girl does in a novel." He got up 
at two in the morning to study army reports while stretched 
on his sofa before the fire — and detected twenty mistakes in 
them ! 

His own explanation of the mechanics of his mind is as 
good as it is familiar: "Various subjects and affairs are 
stowed away in my brain as in a chest of drawers. When I 
take up any special business I shut one drawer and open an- 
other. None of them ever get mixed, and never does this 
incommode me or fatigue me. When I feel sleepy, I shut all 
the drawers and fall asleep." 

Yet this Titan did not really have great physical vigour. 
He was seldom well, often in pain and he generally awoke in 
the morning unrefreshed and depressed. He was subject to 
dizziness, nervous spasms and fainting spells, which led to 
the suspicion that he was epileptic like Cassar, Mahomet and 
some other great geniuses in history. 

Under Napoleon the government ceased to be a government 
by faction, and France no longer was a prey to the bitter 
strife between the ins and the outs. He coined for the new 
era that alluring watchword, ' ' a career open to every talent, ' ' 
and rightly calculated that "nobody is interested in over- 
throwing a government in which all the deserving are em- 
ployed." 

When the task of organising the nation suddenly fell to 
him he knew almost no one in the country except soldiers. 
He had to spy out statesmen as he had spied out the lay of 
the land in his military campaigns in strange countries. He 
prospected for human gifts as another might prospect for gold 
mines. 



138 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

His eye and his intuition seldom deceived him, and men 
soon lost their courage to try to foist a knave upon him. All 
stood in terror of his glance, which shot through them like 
an X-ray, and a foreign diplomat is said to have adopted col- 
oured glasses to screen his soul from that searching gaze. 

Once he had chosen he held to men while a shred of them 
remained, and bore with mediocrity and even betrayal be- 
yond the point where patience in a ruler ceases to be a virtue. 
He framed for himself the motto, "There is no fool that is 
not good for something; there is no intelligence equal to 
everything." Men rated as incompetent surprised their 
friends with the latent abilities which he drew out of them. 
' ' I have a lucky hand, ' ' he chuckled. ' ' Those on whom I lay 
it become fit for anything." 

His great passion was to reunite the French people of all 
classes and, regardless of their past differences, to call into 
the government the ablest men in the nation. He found 
145,000 Frenchmen in exile as aristocrats or priests, while 
300,000 were living on sufferance at home, deprived of all 
civic rights. He restored the rights of the latter and recalled 
the former from their banishment. 

Summoning to the Tuileries a village priest, the most stub- 
born opponent of the Republic in rebellious and Bourbon 
Vendee, he won him over at a word and made him a mediator 
between the state and the church. "While never much of a 
churchman himself, he determined to make peace with the 
Papacy and he bade his ambassador at Rome to "treat the 
Pope as if he had 200,000 soldiers. ' ' 

All this was galling to the spirit of the revolutionists, for 
the Republic and the Pope had been engaged for years in a 
bitter warfare, and the Holy See had been active in the coali- 
tions against France. "I found it more difficult," Napoleon 
said, "to restore religion than to win battles." 

Already the church bells were heard after a silence of 
years, and as Napoleon was walking with councillor Thibau- 
deau in the garden of Malmaison, he stopped and said, 
"Listen to me: Last Sunday I was walking here alone when 
I heard the church bells of Reuil. I was moved by the sound, 



THE LAW GIVER 139 

so strong is the power of early association. I said to myself, 
if such a man as I am can be affected in this way, how deep 
must be the impression on simple, believing souls. ... A 
nation must have a religion. ... I do not believe in any re- 
ligion, but when it comes to speaking of God" — and he 
pointed to the heavens — "Who made all that?" 

"All moral systems are fine," he said again; "but the Gos- 
pel alone has shown a full and complete assemblage of the 
principles of morality, stripped of all absurdity. ... Do you 
wish to find the really sublime? Repeat the Lord's prayer." 

It was, of course, as a statesman and not as an individual 
that he sought the reunion of the church with her "eldest 
daughter," France, coldly arguing: "Society cannot exist 
without inequality of fortunes and inequality of fortunes can- 
not exist without religion. AVhen a man is dying of hunger 
by the side of one who gormandizes, it is impossible for him 
to agree to the difference unless there be some authority to 
say to him, ' God wills it so ; there must be poor and rich in 
this world; but afterward and during eternity the division 
will be made otherwise.' " He reduced religion to the same 
base use and gave it the same earthy, economic motive when 
he said that it "prevents the rich from destroying the poor." 

At the invitation of the First Consul, the papal secretary 
of state, Cardinal Consalvi, came to Paris, and the celebrated 
Concordat was drawn up, a treaty destined to continue in 
force through all the vicissitudes of a century, and not to be 
abrogated until 1905. By the terms of the Concordat the 
Catholic religion was recognised as the religion, not of the 
state, but of a great majority of the people and of the Con- 
suls. On the other hand, the church consented to reduce its 
sees in France by more than one-half and permit the French 
government to nominate all bishops for the approval of the 
Pope, while the bishops in turn were to nominate all priests 
for the approval of the government. The church also gave 
a quitclaim deed to the purchasers of the estates that had 
been taken away from it in the Revolution, and the govern- 
ment in return pledged itself to give the bishops and priests 
a fitting maintenance. 



140 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Another and generally welcome effect of the Concordat was 
the restoration of Sunday. Sunday had been abolished by 
the republican calendar, which provided in its place a day of 
rest each tenth day. Some wit had proved the folly of that 
attempt to change the settled habits of mankind when he said 
the new calendar would ' ' have to fight two enemies who never 
yield, the beard and the shirt;" for ten days surely was too 
long to wait for the weekly shave and change of linen. 

Letizia was the happiest of the Bonapartes at the thought 
of the return to mother church. "Now I need not box your 
ears," she said to Napoleon, "as I used to in order to make 
you go to mass." He had not forgotten her half-brother in 
his negotiations with the church, the uncle who taught him 
the alphabet; Joseph Fesch, having re-entered ecclesiastical 
life, was to be Archbishop of Lyons and a cardinal. 

The two achievements of his Consulate that gave Napoleon 
the most pride was his restoration of the "fallen altars," as 
he said, and the adoption of the Code Napoleon, through 
which, as he boasted, "I have hallowed the Revolution by 
infusing it into our laws. My code is the sheet anchor which 
will save France, and entitle me to the benedictions of pos- 
terity." 

He early set a committee of his council of state at work 
drafting and codifying the laws, and he remorselessly held 
them to the task until they had fashioned more than two thou- 
sand articles into a Code. This body of laws was framed to 
meet every conceivable occasion in the intercourse of a civil- 
ised community, every question that could arise between men 
in business, in the home, in the street. 

Towering above his battle monuments and his arches of 
triumph, the Code stands to this day the greatest and most 
enduring single achievement associated with the name of 
Napoleon. It was the granite foundation on which he reared 
a new France amid the smoking ruins of the old institutions 
that the Revolution had destroyed, a France that has with- 
stood the winds and floods of a stormy century, because it was 
founded on the rock of law and order. 

The tottering nation no sooner had evoked the mighty arm 



THE LAW GIVER 141 

of Napoleon as its crutch, and France no sooner leaned upon 
it than she was filled with dread forebodings of what would 
happen when it should be withdrawn from her support. 
Would the Terror or the Bourbons return? The aristocrats 
and the church looked upon him as their only shield from the 
former, while the revolutionists and the peasant landowners 
regarded him as their protector from the latter. 

He himself was well warranted in declaring that " except 
for a few lunatics who care for nothing but anarchy and a 
few honest men who dream of a spartan republic, the whole 
nation is crying out for a strong and stable government." 
Not merely the placeholders felt their dependence on him, 
but all who were sharing in the new security and prosperity 
of a flourishing national business found themselves limited in 
their calculations to his ten-year term ; then the abyss ! 

The First Consul was hardly in office before a movement 
began to lengthen his term to twenty years, but the proposal 
was immediately amended and his election for life was pro- 
vided instead, with authority to nominate his successor. He 
himself struck out this last provision, for he was still argu- 
ing that "heredity is irreconcilable with the principle of the 
sovereignty of the people and impossible in France." 

There was only one vote against the Consulate for life in the 
Tribunate and that was cast by Carnot. Napoleon was wise 
in insisting on having the law submitted to a referendum of 
the voters, who indorsed it with a unanimity amazing to 
English speaking people: Yes, 3,568,885 votes; no, 8374. 

The First Consul for Life, with an annual allowance from 
the treasury of $1,200,000, felt himself a King in all but the 
crown. His thirty-third birthday was celebrated with the 
pomp and gaiety which Paris so well knows how to display, 
and on the tower of Notre Dame there blazed through the 
night a great fiery star, the star of Napoleon's destiny. 

Dropping the signature of Bonaparte, he began to sign his 
Christian name, Napoleon, after the manner of a royal per- 
sonage. He fairly clapped his hands, this giant sprung from 
the loins of the people, as he thought of himself on an equality 
with the crowned pigmies of Europe : "I am on a level now 



142 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

with foreign sovereigns. They, like me, are rulers for their 
lifetime only. They and their ministers will have much 
higher respect for me now. ' ' The Cisalpine Republic in Italy 
also called him to its presidency. 

Among the dissenters from the life Consulate was Lafa- 
yette, who wrote on the election register that he could not vote 
for an unlimited magistracy unless political liberty was guar- 
anteed. The patriotic Marquis appealed in a letter directly 
to the First Consul: "It is impossible that you, General, the 
foremost in the ranks of those great men who are but rarely 
found throughout the ages, should desire that such a revolu- 
tion as ours, so many victims, so much bloodshed, such mis- 
fortunes, such prodigies, should terminate in the establish- 
ment of an arbitrary regime." 

On reading that communication, Napoleon contemptuously 
exclaimed: "Always thinking of Washington," and dis- 
missed the writer from his thoughts as "a political ninny," 
"an idealogue," who is "constantly harping on America 
without understanding that the French are not Americans." 
It was Lafayette's last effort to preserve the Revolution, and 
he entered into a retirement from which he did not emerge 
while Napoleon remained in power. 

Might he have made himself a Washington instead of a 
Ca?sar? It is hard to say. Against factions at home and 
foes abroad even the power of Napoleon might not have 
availed to make France, with its traditions of royalty and 
ignorance of free institutions, a true republic. But how 
glorious would have been his failure ! 



CHAPTER XVIII 
SELLING LOUISIANA 

1803 AGE 34 

THE Consulate of Napoleon had a more important and 
lasting effect on the United States, a country 3000 
miles away from the French shore, than on even the 
next door neighbours of France. 

The people of the New World are likely to think of them- 
selves as having been mere lookers-on at the great drama of 
Napoleon's life, with a vast ocean between them and the 
theatre of his activities. But even the Atlantic was not a 
moat broad enough to separate them entirely from his for- 
tunes and misfortunes. 

The earliest treaty made by the First Consul was a treaty 
of peace and friendship with the United States, which was 
concluded by Joseph Bonaparte on September 30, 1800. The 
event was celebrated with brilliant fetes at Joseph's country 
estate, Mortefontaine, near Chantilly, in the Parisian suburbs, 
where at an elaborate banquet of 180 covers, the First Consul 
toasted "the manes of the French and Americans who died 
on the field of battle for the independence of the New World. ' ' 

The Americans present would have been sorely distracted 
from the pleasures of that feast at Mortefontaine had they 
known that within twenty-four hours the conqueror of Italy 
and Egypt was secretly to conclude a treaty with Spain which 
would make him the next door neighbour of Uncle Sam. By 
swapping a little Italian kingdom for the vast territory of 
Louisiana, the First Consul became the possessor of more 
square miles of American soil than the United States held and 
also became the master of the greatest river of North America. 

143 



144 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

When, on March 4, 1801, Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated 
third President of the United States, he in common with all 
his countrymen was still ignorant of the existence of that 
hidden treaty of II Defenso, which had been made on the first 
day of the preceding October. At the first rumour of it the 
President and his cabinet were greatly disturbed, while a 
spirit of warlike resistance flamed up in the breasts of the 
Kentuckians and of the other frontier dwellers in the Missis- 
sippi valley. 

"Nothing perhaps since the Kevolution," Jefferson wrote, 
"has produced more uneasy sensations," and he instructed 
Robert R. Livingston, the American minister at Paris, boldly 
to say to the French government : 

"There is on the globe one single spot the possessor of which is our 
natural enemy. It is New Orleans. . . . The day France takes pos- 
session of New Orleans fixes the sentence which is to restrain her 
within her low-water mark. It seals the union of the two nations 
which, in conjunction, can maintain exclusive possession of the ocean. 
From that moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and 
nation." 

Nor did the Commander-in-chief of an army of 3000 
soldiers and of a navy of seven warships pause even there in 
his challenge to the victor of Marengo, but added that "the 
first cannon which shall be fired in Europe" will be "the sig- 
nal for tearing up any settlement made by France in 
America." A member of Napoleon's cabinet truly remarked 
that if any European power had dared to address such lan- 
guage to the First Consul, the words would have been an- 
swered only with guns. Happily, even the Little Corporal's 
24-pounders could not shoot across the Atlantic. 

Fortunately no other man in America better understood 
European politics than the then President. While Napoleon 
went ahead with his project for planting himself at the mouth 
of the Mississippi river, Jefferson prepared for the inevitable 
outbreak of a new war between France and England. Nearly 
six months before the rupture which he foresaw, he proposed 
to Congress that a special mission be sent to Paris, and James 
Monroe was chosen as the commissioner. 



SELLING LOUISIANA 145 

Even while Monroe was on the sea, George III called out 
the British militia and Napoleon stormed at the British am- 
bassador. At last when the American envoy, in a post chaise, 
was hurrying on from Havre to the capital, Napoleon an- 
nounced to two of his ministers that not a moment was to be 
lost m selling Louisiana to the United States before the im- 
pending war should burst upon him, when the territory surely 
would be lost to France. In vain his minister of marine 
Decree, protested that New Orleans was a second Alexandria 
that it could be made more important than any other port on 
the globe and certainly would be of inestimable value when 
a canal across Panama should be constructed. 

Far into the night the three men debated at St. Cloud the 
destiny of Louisiana. After only a brief rest, they met again 
at daybreak, when Napoleon, in his dressing gown and with 
his lap full of newly arrived London despatches, pronounced 
the fate of the great empire. It must be sold at once or it 
would be snatched from France without any compensation. 
After two weeks of chaffering over the biggest land trans- 
action in history the entire parcel was sold to the Ameri- 
cans for $11,250,000 cash and a remission of spoliation claims 
against France to the amount of $3,750,000, or a total of 
$15,000,000 One shearing of sheep in the states of the Lou- 
isiana purchase now would suffice to pay the original price of 
those more than eight hundred thousand square miles. 

On the very day Napoleon ratified the Louisiana treaty, 
there began that war between France and England which 
closed only at Waterloo twelve years afterward. As he 
parted with a territory vaster than his sword ever was to con- 
quer, he consoled himself with the reflection that he had aided 
a competitor of the English on the sea, a competitor who 
sooner or later, he confidently predicted would humble their 
pride When the negotiations were concluded, and he con- 
templated the huge area that he had fairly thrust upon the 
American envoys, who had been charged to buy only the few 
acres comprised within the limits of New Orleans, he chuckled, 
They asked me for a town and I have given them an em- 
pire. 



146 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The last scene in the drama of the Louisiana sale was en- 
acted in the Place d'Armes at New Orleans the week before 
Christmas in the year 1803. 

For 60,000,000 francs in hand, Napoleon opened the 
Tchoupitoulas gate of the town. A little force of American 
soldiers, under General Wilkinson, marched in and drew up 
before the old Cabildo, which still rises by the cathedral of 
St. Louis in the Place d'Armes, now Jackson Square. The 
treaty of cession was read aloud to the people in French and 
English, whereupon Laussat, the commissioner, standing on 
the balcony of the Cabildo, read his credentials from Napo- 
leon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, and Governor Clai- 
borne of the Mississippi territory read his credentials from 
Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States. Laussat 
then surrendered to Claiborne the keys of New Orleans and 
exchanged chairs with him. 

The red, white, and blue banner of France, which had 
floated over New Orleans for only twenty days, was slowly 
lowered on the flagstaff as the red, white, and blue of the 
American Union was hoisted. Midway of the pole, both flags 
paused for a fraternal moment to mingle their folds, while 
the trumpets sounded and the drums rolled. The stars and 
stripes then ascended to the top to receive the salute of the 
artillerymen and musketrymen and the tricolour to the bottom 
reverently to be received in the arms of fifty Louisianians, vet- 
erans of the army of France, who had gathered from distant 
settlements to pay homage to the last banner of the country 
of Champlain, Marquette, La Salle and Montcalm to wave in 
sovereignty above a spot of earth on the continent of North 
America. 



CHAPTER XIX 
A DAY AT MALMAISON 

FRANCE joyed in the Consulate as the glorious sum- 
mer that followed her long- winter of discontent. 
It was the wondrous healing time for the wounds of 
the Revolution. While Napoleon welcomed home the lon*- 
proscnbed aristocrats and priests, he dispelled the fears of 
the republican masses by confirming them forever in the pos- 
session of the property which the Revolution had taken from 
the aristocracy and the church, and sold to them. 

The world was young again. Fortune had shuffled the 
cards and fame was dealing new hands all round Youth 
was m the saddle. The private soldier and the stable boys of 
yesterday, when they had hardly a shirt and a half between 
them, suddenly found their peasant names glorified and 
eclipsing the lustre of the dukes and marquises and counts 
01 the ancient nobility. 

No other hand than Napoleon's ever lifted so great a legion 
ot people out of obscurity into position, out of poverty into 
affluence. For this man, who faced the world with a heart 
of ice, never ceased to take a boyish pride and pleasure in 
sharing his fortunes with all who had known him in his 
poorer days. He hunted up the outcast friars of the over- 
thrown school at Brienne and conferred offices and pensions 
on them, bestowing a snug annuity on even his writing teacher 
who surely had small claim to the gratitude of so wretched a 
penman. His teachers at the Ecole in Paris also were gen- 
erously remembered, while a shower of favours fell upon his 
old neighbours in Corsica and upon all in Valence and Au- 
xonne who had bestowed a friendly nod upon the starveling 
lieutenant when he was stationed in those towns. 
He appointed to the post of conservator of waters and for- 

147 



148 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

ests the mountaineer who led the band of men that rescued 
Mother Letizia from the Ajaccio mob. He pensioned 
Camilla Ilari, his old foster mother, the fisherman's wife 
of Ajaccio, and would gladly have carried her son, his foster 
brother and playmate, along with him, had the young man 
not run away and joined the British navy. He brought his 
foster sister to Paris and introduced her in his court to 
"show what beautiful girls Corsica raises;" he married her off 
to her advantage and stood godfather to her baby boy. 

A caller from Valence was questioned about every one in 
the place and particularly about the woman who kept the 
"Three Pigeons" in the Rue Perollerie, where Second Lieu- 
tenant Bonaparte used to eat his one meal a day. Learning 
she was still living, Napoleon sent her $200 for fear, he said, 
that he might not have paid her for all his cups of coffee. 

One of the first debts of gratitude he discharged was in 
favour of the man who had given him the desk in the war of- 
fice where he had the opportunity to draw up his plan of 
campaign in Italy. When the old official responded to the 
summons, the First Consul said with a smile that reflected 
his pleasure : ' ' You are a senator ! ' ' 

"I was at Toulon," was the magic password at the palace 
door for army men, and even Carteaux, the painter-General 
who had laughed at Captain Bonaparte, was placed on the 
pension rolls. An old nobleman who had lent the impecuni- 
ous father of the First Consul $125 and, of course, had never 
been repaid, was in exile and poverty. "Bourrienne," Na- 
poleon said, with real emotion, as he held in his hand the ap- 
pealing letter from the creditor, "this is sacred. Send the 
old man ten times the amount of the debt and have his name 
erased from the list of the banished." 

Raguideau, Josephine's candid lawyer, who had advised 
her against marrying a man with nothing but a sword and a 
cloak, received a lucrative post. 

Even the humble shopkeepers, who had given him credit 
when he needed it, were honoured with patronage in prefer- 
ence to more fashionable and prosperous tradesmen. The 
obscure cobbler who made his shoes when he was at the Ecole, 



A DAY AT MALMAISON 149 

became the proud bootmaker for the First Consul of France. 
Des Mazis, his one intimate among the pupils at the Ecole, 
the youth who lent the penniless Corsican the money to take 
him to his regiment at Valence, was in exile as an aristocrat, 
but was recalled and received an important office. 

The steadily increasing pageantry of the Consulate was 
outshining the ceremonials of royalty, and a presentation to 
Napoleon and Josephine was more coveted than an introduc- 
tion to the Hapsburgs, the Hohenzollerns or the Guelphs. 
The new court was free from the scandals and stiffness of the 
old courts. Not only was there opened under the Consulate 
a career for every talent, but for every grace as well. 
Beauty no less than ability had a fair field and no favour. 

Although when Napoleon went to take up his residence in 
the Tuileries, most of the dignitaries in the procession had 
to ride in street cabs with pieces of paper pasted over the 
license numbers, and there was hardly a suit of livery left in 
the city, Paris quickly resumed her place as the capital of 
fashion and gaiety. Josephine is said to have had 600 gowns 
in her wardrobe and the women of two worlds moved up their 
waist lines in conformity with her girdle. "The great thing 
for Paris, and I well know it," Napoleon said, "is to furnish 
dances, cooks and fashions to Europe" — that bloody-handed 
Paris which but yesterday was the red terror of tyrants the 
earth over! 

The courtiers and servitors of the Bourbons were wel- 
comed to their old places. Gorgeous ushers reappeared with 
their rods. Judges and lawyers put on their robes again. 
People began to powder their hair and some men even ven- 
tured to sport queues and ruffles. ' ' Monsieur ' ' and ' ' Madam ' ' 
drove out the usurping "Citizen" and " Citizeness. " 

The Tuileries and Malmaison were the centres round which 
the new life of the reborn nation revolved. The former rises 
by the Seine no more, having been long ago levelled in a 
frenzy of revolution. But France to-day cherishes as a patri- 
otic shrine the home of Napoleon and Josephine at Malmai- 
son in the pristine glory of the Consulate, when they still typi- 
fied the majesty of the Republic. 



150 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

That modest, suburban three-story stone villa at Reuil in 
the valley of the Seine between St. Cloud and St. Germain 
en Laye and only eight or nine miles from the centre of 
Paris looks more like the country house of a merchant than 
the seat of a great ruler. Josephine selected it while her hus- 
band was in Egypt and the purchase price was only $32,000. 

But she bought adjoining lands and laid out a park that 
was fit for a fairy princess. Only a little of this remains, 
however, the estate having lately been cut up into villa gar- 
dens. One of the new streets that crosses what was formerly 
the park bears the name of the Rue Tuck, in recognition of 
an American from New Hampshire who was influential in 
the development of the neighbourhood. 

Malmaison is treasured now among the priceless national 
monuments of France. Pilgrims from all over the world 
pour in streams through the shady gateway of the chateau 
and into its halls and chambers, sighing over Josephine's 
harp with its broken strings, and looking with curious eyes 
at Josephine's bed whereon she died, her ornate washstand, 
her gorgeous dinner service and costly ornaments, mostly the 
gifts of sovereigns and governments, her work table and em- 
broidery frame. 

The cedar she planted still casts its shade out on the lawn, 
where the tents used to be pitched as in an army camp, and 
where in his shirtsleeves Napoleon played "prisoner's base" 
with hilarious young men and screaming young women. 
The shepherd's hut and the Swiss dairy have vanished from 
the park; the marble gods and nymphs that Josephine set up 
are mossy with age; her cascade and lake, on which she lav- 
ished a fortune, are gone dry, but the bridge still spans the 
now arid bed of the brook. 

Her theatre no longer stands among the trees, where the 
consular court were wont to gather and be entertained by the 
famous players of Paris. There, too, some of the great actors 
in the drama of the Napoleonic era used to play at amateur 
theatricals, with Josephine as the presiding genius, and when 
Napoleon prankishly hissed, she announced that any person 



A DAY AT MALMAISON 151 

dissatisfied with the performance could have his money re- 
funded at the door. 

The prettiest memorials of Josephine in her fanciful Eden 
are the flowers and shrubs she imported from her native Mar- 
tinique, a few of which go on blooming as when she watched 
over these friends of her childhood and watered them with 
her own hands. She drew on that West Indian island for 
many kinds of seeds and plants, but begged in vain for her 
mother to come to her. She sent her the handsome chaplet 
which the Pope gave her, and Hortense drew for her grand- 
mother a portrait of Napoleon walking in the park of Mal- 
maison. Mme. Tascher, however, chose to live on in the 
kitchen of the ruined house at Trois Islets alone with a negro 
servant. 

Josephine called the garden at Malmaison her family, and 
her favourite salon was in a big greenhouse, where she held 
court in the midst of fragrance and beauty. Botany, per- 
haps, was her one certain accomplishment. She could neither 
sing nor play any instrument, for the harp with the broken 
strings, which the pilgrims to Malmaison see now, only serves 
to recall the prosaic fact that its mistress' repertory was lim- 
ited to a single air. She dabbled a bit with tapestry, and she 
and her friends made the coverings for some of the furni- 
ture in the house. 

But she was most at home with her flowers. One of her 
pleasures was to array her lithesome self in simple India mus- 
lin and lead her husband along the winding, bloom-em- 
broidered paths, for he always vowed that the prettiest sight 
for mortal eyes was a tall, slender woman in white, strolling 
in a leafy lane. She liked to bewilder his botanical igno- 
rance with her knowledge of the names and habits of all the 
things in her little floral world, and we are told that she wept 
m her great Paris palace when he kept her away from Mal- 
maison in the flowering time of her hyacinths and tulips— a 
single tulip bulb had cost her $800. 

The First Consul 's own special favourites in the park were 
the gazelles which had been brought from Egypt. He used 



152 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

to amuse himself by feeding them, and he laughed to find 
them inordinately fond of eating out of his snuff box. Some 
moufflons, or wild sheep, he imported from Corsica, disap- 
pointed him, however, by rejecting his hospitality and run- 
ning away. 

Josephine 's rare song birds, at which her spouse, in a spirit 
of rude teasing, aimed his pistol shots from a chateau win- 
dow, no longer sing in the trees of Malmaison, whose barks 
bear the bullet scars of the German invader in the Franco- 
Prussian War. For alien armies have twice invaded Napo- 
leon's dooryard — in 1815 and in 1870. 

The bell of the old Keuil church still sends its peals upon 
the air as in the days when it was music to the ear of Na- 
poleon. "Ah," the man of state sighed, "that reminds me 
of the bells of Brienne. I was happy there!" The bell, 
however, was not his only reminder of Brienne. He had 
appointed Fr. Dupuis one of the old friars and teachers 
there, to be the librarian at Malmaison, although there really 
was no library in the house, and Fr. Dupuis never was seen 
to touch a book; but his one-time pupil enjoyed seeing him 
about the place. The porter of the Brienne school, too, was 
brought to Malmaison and installed in a like post at the 
chateau. 

The woodland workroom of the First Consul is yet in the 
park, a little vine-clad retreat from the frivolity of the young 
people who filled the chateau with their mirth. But his pref- 
erence was a tent in the garden, and one of his campaign tents 
is there now. In such a place he carried on at Malmaison 
much of the business of his widespread realm. "I cannot 
understand men," he said, "who can sit by the stove and 
work without any view of the sky." 

Mme. de Remusat said that he was only fitted for a tent or 
a throne, where everything would be permitted him, for, she 
tells us, he did not know how to enter or leave a room, make 
a bow, sit down properly or converse ; he could only ask 
abrupt questions or make impertinent comments. Mme. de 
Stael, on the other hand, was so pleased by an interview she 
held with him that she reported the remarkable dialogue, 



A DAY AT MALMAISON 153 

which Josephine condemned, however, as an exhibition of her 
husband's vulgarity: 

"General, whom do you regard as the greatest woman in 
the world?" 

"She, madam, who has borne the most children." 

"But whom do you esteem highest?" 

"She who is the best housekeeper." 

"It is said, General, you are not fond of women?" 

"Pardon me, madam, I am very fond of my wife." 

Although Stendhal tells us that Napoleon's look became 
excessively gentle when he spoke to a woman, his wizardry 
was pretty sharply confined to the limits of his own sex and 
left women comparatively unen thralled. He treated them 
too much like soldiers, often walking down a line of loveli- 
ness as if he were on a military inspection. Sometimes he 
playfully pinched their ears till they shrieked, reproving them 
if their cheeks were not rouged to his taste, or chiding them 
for wearing old gowns. 

"You are too pale," he said to Mme. de Remusat, as if 
rebuking a grenadier for a spot on his coat; "two things 
are very becoming to women, rouge and tears." To another 
woman he exclaimed, "Heavens! How red your elbows 
are!" To another, "What an ugly headdress!" Mme. 
Junot was too defiant. "Remember," he admonished her, 
"a woman ceases to charm whenever she makes herself 
feared." 

Yet this same Mme. Junot herself assures us in her venge- 
ful "Memoirs" that it is impossible to describe the charm of 
his countenance, the magic of his smile when he was animated 
by a feeling of benevolence — "his soul was upon his lips and 
in his eyes." She describes his brows as formed to wear the 
crowns of the whole world ; his hands as worthy the envy of 
the most coquettish woman; a white, soft skin covering his 
muscles of steel. 

It is certain he was not lacking in one respect : his air was 
already regal and his appearance had grown majestic. 
Much of the time until he was twenty-four or twenty-five, he 
did not have enough to eat; but in the Consulate he was no 



154 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

longer lean and hungry-looking. On the contrary, his hollow 
cheeks had rounded into a becoming fulness ; his complexion, 
having lost its yellowness, was clear and fresh ; his body, 
plump but not yet portly, now filled out his clothes. 

How tall was Napoleon? In the first place, he was by no 
means as short as many historians have mistakenly assumed. 
Some of the most careful writers have fallen into error on 
this point, through an inaccurate translation. The transla- 
tors of Constant and of Mallet du Pan say he was five feet 
three inches, while the translator of Baron de Meneval says 
he was five feet two inches. Those latter figures are most gen- 
erally adopted. 

It is true that by the French measurement he was five feet 
two inches and four lines ; but the French foot is longer than 
the English, and Napoleon's actual height was five feet six 
and one-third inches. His grey overcoat hanging now in the 
Hotel des Invalides is itself four feet three inches in length. 

His stature therefore was not far from medium, according 
to the modest standards of Latin nations. His habit of stoop- 
ing, however, with his hands behind him, and his short neck 
made him appear shorter than he was. He did not have the 
vanity of small men to make themselves seem larger and em- 
ployed no trick to enhance his height. 

His shoulders were broad and his trunk was long for his 
legs, which, however, were well shaped. He was vain of his 
small feet — his treasured shoes and slippers look like a 
woman's — of his delicate hand with its tapering fingers, and 
of his teeth, albeit they were hardly worthy of his pride. 

His bust was a handsome one, in spite of being mounted on 
an inadequate pedestal; well designed for the gallery of im- 
mortals. The profile was modelled to adorn an imperial coin- 
age, while the great head, twenty-two inches in circumference, 
which had alarmed his family in his infancy, the high broad 
forehead, the luminous grey, eagle eyes, the straight, sensi- 
tive nose, the smooth, ivory skin were the delight of artists, 
many of whom, however, chose to give him dark hair rather 
than his own fine, though thin, chestnut locks. We see some 
lack of strength in the under lip, as it was drawn in his early 



A DAY AT MALMAISON 155 

portraits, but when he rose to mastery, the painters and 
sculptors corrected their predecessors in this detail, or per- 
haps improved on nature herself. 

The expression of his face was so active that it was like a 
moving-picture film of his mind. He could still smile when 
he became Consul, as softly, as sweetly as a girl, but he could 
no longer laugh. 

If angered, a sort of cyclone suddenly tore across his coun- 
tenance and convulsed every feature; a tempest swept the 
brow; the eyes blazed; the nostrils swelled; the mouth con- 
tracted; the hand seized the offender or smashed the 
gilded furniture of a palace chamber. But the storm passed 
as quickly as it came, and left him as calm as a summer har- 
bour after a downpour of rain. Notwithstanding these facial 
hurricanes, he insisted that his passions never rose above his 
neck, and his physicians corroborate him with the report that 
his blood was not given to rushing to his head. 

He had the weak desire of one who had suffered from pov- 
erty and privation to see himself surrounded with a display 
of luxury and splendour. But Josephine 's almost childish ex- 
travagance often made him wince. The mistress of Malmai- 
son had far more taste than thrift, and she pursued her love 
of pretty things there and in Paris with a light-hearted dis- 
regard of the cost. 

The tradesmen were quick to discover her weakness and 
prey upon it. Napoleon had forbidden them admission to 
her, but laden with their tempting wares they penetrated and 
crowded her apartments. When at last their clamours for 
payments came to his ears, he ordered Bourrienne to investi- 
gate the matter. Josephine confessed to the secretary that 
she owed $240,000, but begged him to conceal half of the stag- 
gering total from her husband for the present, in order to 
spare her his violence. 

The pile of bills astounded Bourrienne; thirty-eight new 
hats, heron plumes to the value of $360, and perfumes to the 
value of $160 in one month. The secretary called in the credi- 
tors and insisted on cutting their extortionate charges in half. 
One man who had made out a bill for $16,000 received only 



156 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

$7000, but was still able to congratulate himself on having 
made a liberal profit. 

That was not Bourrienne 's only unpleasant experience of 
the same kind. When Napoleon bestowed on a sister as a 
wedding gift a necklace belonging to Josephine, she longed to 
replace the ornament with some pearls she had seen which 
once belonged to Marie Antoinette. The price was $50,000 
cash, and not daring to propose such an extravagance to Na- 
poleon, she was aided to make the purchase by General Ber- 
thier, who proceeded to extort the needed amount from a big 
army contractor. 

After getting the coveted pearls, Josephine could not sum- 
mon the courage to wear them and let them be seen by her 
husband, who Bourrienne tells us was somewhat of a busy- 
body. Finally, unable longer to resist and conceal the beau- 
tiful necklace, she implored the secretary to stay near her 
and defend her in the inevitable scene. 

"How fine you are to-day," Napoleon said; and then, just 
as she had expected and feared, he added, "What is it you 
have there? Where did you get those pearls?" 

" O ! Mon Dieu ! ' ' Josephine replied in her most caressing 
tone. "You have seen them a dozen times before. It is the 
necklace the Cisalpine Republic gave me. Ask Bourrienne; 
he will tell you." 

"Yes, General," the second conspirator said in corrobora- 
tion of the first, "I recollect very well seeing this necklace 
before." 

Still Josephine was worth all she cost Napoleon. Great 
stage director as he was, his court never would have been 
much more than a camp except for the assistance of his wife. 
He said in Italy: "I win battles while Josephine wins 
hearts." 

He bound together the French factions in law and justice 
and glory; but socially the old France and the new were 
united by the tact and charm of Josephine. It was in her 
drawing room, long before they would cross his threshold, 
that the returning aristocrats first consented to mingle with 
the men and women of the Revolution. She filled with flow- 



A DAY AT MALMAISON 157 

ers the bloody chasm that had long divided them, and drew 
them together with her smile. She cared nothing for their 
tragic quarrel and was herself too amiable for quarrelling. 
"She has no more resentment than a pigeon," Napoleon said. 

As the women of the nobility began to gather about her, 
she did not forget her friends in the dark days and wept 
when her husband drew the line on Mme. Tallien, her com- 
panion in prison. Napoleon assured her he liked her loyalty 
and was sorry to ban old friends ; but a new court had to be 
very careful of its moral tone. 

Already the shadow of the coming dynasty had fallen upon 
Josephine and Fouche had read aloud to the First Consul in 
the presence of others a newspaper report that her divorce 
was contemplated because she had not presented her husband 
with an heir. Josephine, too, had frequently been made to 
listen to the same disquieting suggestion. Her new position 
in the world was costing her dear, and she was not a very 
ambitious woman. If she still did not love her husband, she 
had grown fond enough to be loyal to him and to suffer the 
pangs of jealousy from his disloyalty. 

As the dyer's hand is subdued to what it works in, a man 
cannot exercise a despotism without developing a despotic 
nature. Napoleon had become a law unto himself in all 
things great and small. "I am not a man like other men," 
he frankly told Mme. de Remusat, "and moral laws and the 
laws of propriety do not apply to me." As his iron power 
over nations increased, he could no longer feel bound by the 
silken tie of matrimony, and every day the poor, little wife 
saw her eagle soaring farther and farther away from her. 

The net of intrigue, drawing about her day by day, grew 
finer and finer in its mesh. To gain more influence in the 
hostile counsels of the Bonaparte family, she promoted the 
marriage of General Murat with Caroline Bonaparte, rely- 
ing on Murat 's friendship to aid her. In increasing des- 
peration and though loving her dearly, she sacrificed even 
her own daughter to save herself. Anxiously promoting a 
further alliance with the Bonapartes, she made a match that 
was no match at all between Hortense and Louis Bonaparte. 



158 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OP NAPOLEON 

They hated each other, and the bride was led weeping to the 
altar. Their first baby being a boy, Josephine welcomed him 
as a candidate for the succession and he was christened Na- 
poleon Charles. 

The lack of an heir probably was not Josephine's only mo- 
tive for counselling her husband against dynastic ambitions; 
very likely a woman's native prudence was also among her 
promptings. Her heart sank now as in the days of her court- 
ship when she marked the wild flights of his fancy and am- 
bition. 

Once Napoleon asked her to tell him his defects and she 
replied, "I know only two: weakness and indiscretion. You 
permit yourself to be influenced by persons who are only 
seeking your downfall, and you are so fond of arguing that 
you let your secret thoughts escape." He fondly took her 
in his arms as he admitted the correctness of her diagnosis — 
and put aside her womanly intuition. She warned him again 
and again, as she told Thibaudeau, that "two things ruin men 
— weakness and ambition." But she complained he would not 
discuss politics with her. Did a man ever discuss his plunges 
with his wife? 

Seating herself on his knee and running her hand through 
his hair, she said to him: "I entreat you, Bonaparte, do not 
make yourself King ! ' ' But the husband gently and smilingly 
dismissed her like a child, "Come now! You interrupt me — 
leave me alone!" Bourrienne reports the interview and also 
Josephine's later appeal to him, when he told her that he 
feared Napoleon could not be dissuaded from placing a crown 
on her head. "My God! Bourrienne," she replied, "such an 
ambition is farthest from my wish. Try to prevent his mak- 
ing himself King." The secretary confessed that he had al- 
ready exhausted his influence to thwart Napoleon's purposes 
and had reminded him that being childless he would have no 
one to whom to bequeath the throne. 

' ' My kind friend, ' ' Josephine eagerly inquired, ' ' when you 
spoke of children, did he say anything to you? Did he talk 
of a divorce?" Bourrienne lowers the curtain on this scene 
with Josephine crying, "Good God! How unhappy I am!" 



F 



CHAPTER XX 

HOW THE REPUBLIC DIED 

RANCE, under the Consulate, quickly became the envy 
of the nations. 

It was an era of unexampled peace and order. All 
men were equal before the law and free to do what they liked, 
only provided they let politics alone. Peasant and noble 
were safe in their homes, their properties and their businesses. 
"The stage coach went without a guard." The country 
waxed prosperous beyond all precedent. Taxes were light 
and the national bonds rose in two golden years from twelve 
francs to sixty-five. 

Yet the Republic perished. The operation was successful, 
but the patient died! 

The Consulate was a brilliant and benevolent despotism. 
It took away only the people's dream of liberty and their 
ideal of a free republic, two boons they never had enjoyed. 
It gave them in exchange the abounding genius and energy 
of Napoleon, who served them better than they could serve 
themselves. 

A wise and pure despotism is the wisest and purest of gov- 
ernments. But its fatal defect is that it dries up the springs 
of its wisdom and purity, public opinion. As the First Con- 
sul waxed more masterful, the French people sank into a 
dumb subserviency until he could no longer hear their voice. 
As he grew stronger, they grew weaker, until they trembled 
at the thought of standing alone and at last surrendered them- 
selves wholly to his iron will. 

Many look back upon the Consulate, with its centralisation 
of power, its revival of official ceremonies and its inaugura- 
tion of the Legion of Honour, as one long, crafty, cold-blooded 
conspiracy against the Republic on the part of the First Con- 

159 



160 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

sul, who, day by day, warily and steadily crept toward the 
throne. 

This opinion, however, gives too much credit to his fore- 
sight, a quality in which he was strangely deficient. For this 
man was not the architect of his own fortunes. His plans 
were overruled in nearly every important instance and he 
was always the creature of circumstances. He had chosen 
to be a writer rather than a soldier, to go into the real estate 
business rather than into the Revolution, to be a Corsican 
rather than a Frenchman, to be a drillmaster for the Sultan 
of Turkey rather than serve in the army of the Republic, to 
seek martial glory in Asia rather than in Europe, and finally 
to return to the Army of Italy rather than be First Consul. 

Once he was installed as dictator of France, in November, 
1799, the throne was the natural if not inevitable goal of the 
dictatorship. It was as unnecessary for him to conspire for 
the crown as for the consulship, as unnecessary for him to plot 
against the Republic as against the Directory. He frankly 
said to the council of state: "France is not yet a republic; 
whether she will be one is still highly problematical ; the next 
five or six years will decide." That was true, and nine 
Frenchmen out of ten knew it. 

Enemies as well as friends played their part in hurrying 
the Republic toward the Empire and Napoleon toward the 
throne, all classes and events conspiring to the same end. 
Bourbon plots supplied, indeed, the strongest argument for 
making the change. 

The old royal family in their exile persisted in the folly 
which had lost them their kingdom. It was truly said of the 
Bourbons that in their misfortunes, "they learned nothing 
and forgot nothing." Failing in their armed treason against 
their country as allies of jealous foreign nations, they de- 
scended to the next step in their degradation and tried to 
bribe their way back to the throne. When Napoleon came 
they found a man they could not buy. 

After he became First Consul, the pretender, Louis XVIII, 
younger brother of Louis XVI, wrote the young ruler, beg- 
ging for the lost throne and bluntly asking him to name his 



HOW THE REPUBLIC DIED 161 

price : " If you doubt my gratitude, fix your reward and mark 
out the fortunes of your friends." To that base appeal from 
the son of St. Louis, the son of the people returned this kingly 
reply: "You must not seek to return to France. To do so 
you would have to trample upon 100,000 dead bodies. Sac- 
rifice your interest to the repose and happiness of France, and 
history will render you justice." 

In their despair the Bourbons then sank to the level of 
assassins. For years they had maintained their emissaries in 
Paris for the purpose of fomenting revolution and anarchy. 
But, under Napoleon's masterful rule, the country was 
quickly pacified and the nation reunited. France prospered 
and revolutions languished. 

The Bourbons found themselves without an active party, 
and unable even to incite a riot. If they could not hope to 
overthrow the government, they could plot the assassination 
of Napoleon. As he was on his way to the opera in the win- 
ter of 1800-1, his driver, a veteran who had been with him 
in Egypt, and whom he had nicknamed Caesar, found a cart, 
apparently a water cart, standing across the street. When 
the escort had drawn it to one side, Ca?sar, exasperated by the 
delay, whipped up his horses and drove on at a furious pace. 
In two seconds an infernal machine on the cart exploded. 

Cassar had driven so fast as to remove his distinguished 
passenger beyond harm's reach, but several persons in the 
street had been killed and many wounded. More than forty 
houses were shattered, and even the glass in the windows of 
the Tuileries was smashed. 

Napoleon gave rein to a passion for punishing the perpe- 
trators of the outrage. He refused to believe that the Bour- 
bons would resort to such a murderous measure, although his 
minister of police, Fouche, insisted it was a royalist and not 
a republican plot. "They are the Terrorists," the First Con- 
sul insisted, "wretches stained with blood. The Bourbons are 
simply a skin disease, but the Terrorists are an internal 
malady." 

In his determination to terrify the Terrorists, 130 men were 
rushed into penal banishment without any evidence against 



162 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

them. Afterward it was discovered that they had nothing 
to do with the infernal machine, and that it was the work of 
the royalists, two of whom were detected, convicted, and ex- 
ecuted. Yet, so persistent was Napoleon's suspicion that the 
Terrorists were a menace to his government he did not recall 
the poor exiles from their prison colony in the tropics. 

Fouche, whose duty it was to watch the enemies of the 
First Consul, but who always kept the sharpest watch on the 
First Consul himself, boasted in after years that he hired 
Bourrienne to spy on his chief. The Bourbon conspirators 
also passed around the word that "the secretary is for sale." 
However that may be, the tender spot which Napoleon always 
kept for old friends and associates was sore wounded by the 
oldest and closest of them all. He had been glad to share 
his prosperity with Bourrienne as freely as they had shared 
their poverty at Brienne and in the streets of Paris. He 
gave him apartments in the Tuileries and also gave his family 
an independent establishment. 

Disdaining to limit his friend and confidant to a fixed 
salary, he invited him to help himself from their common 
cash drawer in the palace, and no account was kept between 
them. He flattered himself he could share with him even his 
fame. "Ah, Bourrienne!" he proudly exclaimed. "You 
also will be immortal." 

"How, General?" the friend asked. 

"Are you not my secretary 7 ?" 

Poor Bourrienne could not content himself with this re- 
flected immortality, and loving what his chief despised, 
money, he yielded to the one sin Napoleon always refused to 
compound in his own immediate household. When at last a 
case in court disclosed the secretary as a partner of govern- 
ment contractors and his avarice thus became a public scan- 
dal, the First Consul dismissed him, telling him as he slammed 
the door in his face, "Never let me see you again." 

"Why!" Napoleon grieved to Meneval, the assistant who 
now took the place of the unfaithful secretary, "I have known 
that man since he was nine years old !" Still wishing to spare 



HOW THE REPUBLIC DIED 163 

him the full measure of disgrace, he officially announced that 
Bourrienne had been promoted to other duties, and, indeed, 
it was not long until he did find employment for him. But 
he would not see him, and they never met again except on 
one occasion, when Bourrienne was summoned to receive his 
commission as minister at Hamburg, where for many years 
he continued his peculations and ended by conspiring with 
the Bourbons against his forbearing friend and benefactor. 

The Bourbons never relented or rested in their savage pur- 
pose to strike down the man that stood in their way. They 
seized upon the reopening of the war between England and 
France to spring their grand plot. It began to unfold itself 
late in the summer of 1803, when an English naval officer 
landed a little party of French royalists at the foot of a steep 
cliff on the coast of Normandy. The leader was a remarkable 
character, a Breton named Georges Cadoudal, who had bravely 
fought in the royalist rebellions of La Vendee in the time of 
the Revolution. Georges was joined by General Pichegru, a 
teacher of Napoleon in the military school of Brienne and 
later a general in the Revolution. Pichegru 's part in the 
plot was to induce General Moreau, the foremost military 
commander under the First Consul, to enter into the conspir- 
acy, and win over the support of the army. Once Moreau 's 
co-operation was assured, two of the Bourbon princes, the 
Count d'Artois and the Duke de Berry, were to come from 
England, personally join in waylaying Napoleon on the road 
to Malmaison, and, having abducted or assassinated him, seize 
the government in the name of Louis XVIII. 

Pichegru found Moreau ready enough to conspire, but not 
for the Bourbons. "Do with Bonaparte what you will," he 
said, "but do not ask me to put a Bourbon in his place." 
Nevertheless Moreau soon found himself locked up, for spies 
were following the conspiracy step by step. 

Napoleon wished above all to catch the Bourbon princes, 
and he posted Savary at the cliff on the Normandy coast to 
lie in wait there for the princely prey. He was filled with a 
ferocious passion for revenge on the royalists. "Am I a dog 



164 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

to be beaten to death in the streets?" he demanded. "I will 
pitilessly shoot the very first of these princes who shall fall 
into my hands." 

Moreau having disappointed them, however, the princes did 
not climb up on the cliff where Savary sat watching like a 
terrier beside a rat-hole. Nor could the hiding places of 
Georges and Pichegru be found until Paris suddenly shut down 
on them like a trap. The gates of the city were closed, the 
walls were patrolled and no one was permitted to leave the 
capital. Pichegru was hunted down and thrown into prison, 
where he strangled himself to death in his cell. Next Georges 
was found and taken in the street, but not until he had shot 
dead one of his pursuers and seriously wounded another. 
He and nineteen of his accomplices, including a marquis and 
the heir to a dukedom, were tried and condemned to die. 
Moreau was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, but Na- 
poleon pardoned him, on condition that he go to the United 
States and stay there. 

Meanwhile a Bourbon prince had been caught. In the 
midst of the excitement attending the man hunt in Paris, a 
report was received that the young Duke d'Enghien, a de- 
scendant of the great Conde, was living in the duchy of 
Baden, a few miles from the French frontier, where he was 
conspiring with General Dumouriez, another General of the 
Revolution, who, like Pichegru, had been bought up by the 
Bourbons. It was further reported that the Prince had actu- 
ally made secret visits to Paris. 

A squad of thirty horsemen was sent into Baden, although 
it was not French soil ; the Duke was kidnapped and hurried 
to Paris. While he was on the way, however, it became 
known to the government that he had not been with Dumou- 
riez at all, and it was seen that there was no evidence what- 
ever that he had any part in the plottings of the other branch 
of the Bourbon family. It was true that he had served in 
foreign armies against France and was then in the pay of 
England, but he was not a conspirator. 

Napoleon's rage, however, was now beyond control. The 
fight had become a Corsican vendetta between the Bonapartes 



HOW THE EEPUBLIC DIED 165 

and the Bourbons, and no kinsman of the foe should be spared. 
Some of those around the First Consul might stand aghast 
at the thought of shedding royal blood, but he declared, 
"Neither is my blood ditchwater ! " To the tearful appeals 
of the terrified Josephine, he commanded, "Begone! You 
are a child ! ' ' 

Late in a March afternoon of 1804, the captive Duke was 
conducted into the big, grey fortress of Vincennes, four miles 
from the heart of Paris. Although he was yet to be placed 
on trial, his grave was already dug in the moat on the other 
side of the castle. At six o'clock in the morning the Duke 
was led out of the door of the castle, the door that looks upon 
what is now one of the prettiest and most popular of the 
forest playgrounds of Paris, and down into the moat. There 
he was placed with his back to the wall of the tower and fac- 
ing the firing squad. His request that a priest be summoned 
to attend him was ignored, but when he asked that he might 
be permitted to send a lock of his hair to his sweetheart, the 
Duchess de Rohan, the commander of the squad gruffly in- 
quired of his men, "Has any one of you a pair of scissors?" 
The scissors were found and the lock was clipped. 

The Duke's last appeal to his executioners was for them 
not to miss their aim, and in another instant he fell before 
the fatal volley, pierced through the heart. The corpse was 
pushed into the gaping hole beside it, but there to pause only 
a few years until the return of the Bourbons, when it was 
disinterred and laid to rest in the chapel of the grim old 
castle. 

A small slender column of marble was erected in the grassy 
moat at the time the body was removed, and there it still 
stands under the gaze of the morbid and the curious, marking 
the spot where the last of the House of Conde fell — and 
where, too, in the twelfth year of its age the Republic fell! 
For it was well said of the Bourbon conspirators that they 
came to give France a King and gave her an Emperor. 

The blood of the Bourbons, and indeed of all the royalty in 
Europe, ran cold with horror at the news of how the Duke 
d'Enghien had died. The court of the Czar Alexander I at 



166 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Petrograd went into mourning, and the King of Prussia re- 
coiled from Napoleon into an alliance with Russia. 

Paris met the event with mixed feelings. Some protest- 
ing person coined his whispered denunciation of the killing 
in a memorable phrase, "It is worse than a crime — it is a 
blunder!" 

The evening of the tragic day was a silent and gloomy 
occasion at Malmaison. The strain was not broken until the 
company had risen from dinner, when Napoleon himself be- 
gan to speak of the inevitable cruelties which history charged 
against rulers from the time of the Roman Emperors, 
abruptly concluding with the exclamatory declaration : ' ' They 
wish to destroy the Revolution in attacking my person, for 
I, I, I am the Revolution!" 

At once the suggestion was flashed abroad that the only 
security for the peace of the country and the security of the 
new order against the old, lay in providing an hereditary 
succession. Fouche and his police hastily diverted their en- 
ergies from hunting down plotters against the First Consul 
to forwarding a plot of their own against the Republic. Five 
days after the death of the Duke d'Enghien, several electoral 
colleges obediently responded to their instructions and laid 
at the feet of Napoleon their appeals that his authority might 
be perpetuated in his family. 

The great conspiracy that was still agitating the country 
served well to make the nation feel its dependence on one mor- 
tal life, which might be cut off in an instant and leave the 
country plunged in chaos. ' ' This work we do, this money we 
risk," the people are represented as saying, "this house we 
build, these trees we plant — what will become of them if Na- 
poleon dies?" Establish a dynasty and the royalist assassins 
would see the uselessness of striking down the head of the 
government, with a long line of heirs standing behind him, 
and would cease to disturb the land. Moreover, set up a 
throne and monarchial Europe would no longer band against 
France as a menace to kings. 

The Republic was dead — long live Napoleon! 



CHAPTER XXI 
TWICE CROWNED 

1804-1805 AGE 34-35 

ALL the world's a stage, and for twenty brilliant sea- 
sons Napoleon was the stage manager. When his 
audience, which comprised mankind, had grown weary 
of the melodrama and tragedy of revolutions and wars and 
murderous plots, he relieved the tension by putting on, in the 
season of 1804-05, that spectacular production which is' known 
to history as the Coronation of Napoleon and Josephine. 
Only the unparalleled, dramatic gifts of the star performer 
could have saved such a wild extravaganza from degenerating 
into a farce, and a venerable archbishop who took part in it 
confessed that if any one in the house had laughed, the show 
would have been roared off the boards. 

A novelty-loving world looked on spellbound as France sud- 
denly was transformed, like a lightning-change artist, from a 
spartan Republic into a gilded Empire, and her fanatical 
patriots and Terrorists into humble but gaudy courtiers, while 
the horrid guillotine, as if by magic, was changed into a 
sumptuous throne, the bloody pike into a golden sceptre and 
the red cap of the Revolution into a glittering crown. 

Even more amazing still was the versatility displayed by the 
actors in the principal roles. The little charity boy of the 
King at Brienne twenty years before, the hungering, melan- 
choly, wandering alien in the street of Paris only ten years 
before, strutted upon the stage in imperial robes as if born 
m the purple. And his wife, an alien like himself, who was 
but yesterday an imprisoned and penniless widow, looked her 
queenly part to perfection as she came on, followed by a train 
of princes and princesses, who, a decade ago, had been 

167 



168 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

stranded on the shore of France, poverty-stricken refugees 
from the then seinibarbarous Island of Corsica. 

The curtain raiser of the imperial drama was only a mario- 
nette show, with Fouche, that glorified plain clothes man, 
pulling the strings while the puppets of the legislative body 
went through the motions of offering the crown. The sena- 
tors ran from their chambers, leaped into their carriages and 
raced out to the palace of St. Cloud in the tumultuous eager- 
ness of each to be first at the foot of the new Caesar. There 
they found him in simple military uniform with Josephine 
beside him, and, addressing the General of yesterday as 
"Sire," they duly proclaimed "Napoleon Bonaparte, Em- 
peror of the French," whereat the cry of "Long live the Em- 
peror" rang through the palace halls and was echoed by a 
swarm of suitors in the garden. A gay cavalcade next ap- 
peared in various squares of Paris, where with the blare of 
trumpets they acclaimed Napoleon, Emperor, to idly curious 
and sometimes laughing crowds which at the suggestion of a 
monarchy a few years before would have drenched those very 
streets with blood. 

Last of all, and when the Empire really had been estab- 
lished three months, the wishes of the country were consulted 
on the proposal to make "Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of 
the French and the imperial dignity hereditary in his natural 
or adopted descent and in the descent from his brothers Joseph 
and Louis." The heirs of Lucien and Jerome were excluded 
from the line of succession because those two Bonapartes had 
lately married to suit themselves and not their brother. 

Meanwhile Napoleon had forsaken the camp of his army and 
forgotten his projected invasion of England in his attention 
to his multitude of duties as stage director, costumer, car- 
penter, and property man of the great burlesque which he was 
busily preparing. 'Tis a pity, but it must be said in frank- 
ness that his scenario was wholly devoid of invention and 
that his stage business was altogether old and hackneyed. 

Prudent nature imposed sharp limitations on this giant to 
save the world from his thrall. For in showering her gifts 
upon him she withheld two qualities which, omitted, bound 



TWICE CROWNED 169 

the voyage of his wonderful life in shallows and miseries. 
He lacked originality and he had no real sense of humour. 

Had he been original, he would have planned his corona- 
tion in keeping with the Revolution and the Republic, whose 
creature he was, and made it imposing by its simplicity. 
Had he been endowed with a wholesome sense of humour, he 
would not have disclosed his parvenu spirit by striving vainly 
to hide his demorcratic origin in a wrapping of tinsel and 
by aping with Simian tricks the meaningless ceremonials of 
the dead past. 

Anxious to disguise all his associates as well as himself, he 
suddenly made over his brothers, Joseph and Louis, their 
wives, Julie Clary and Hortense Beauharnais, and his own 
sisters into princes and princesses. He tricked out uncle 
Fesch, now Cardinal, as grand almoner, and arrayed eighteen 
generals, all good republican products, in the trappings of 
marshals of the Empire, while his two colleagues in the Con- 
sulate, Cambaceres and LeBrun, became arch chancellor and 
arch treasurer, and Talleyrand grand chancellor. 

He commanded Berthier to exchange the proud rank of 
general, won on the field of battle, for the absurdity of grand 
master of the hounds, and he concealed General Duroc be- 
neath the designation of grand marshal of the palace, while 
Caulaincourt, able statesman, became the imperial hostler, or 
master of the horse. As he saw those sons of the Revolution 
parading about in their imperial livery, he laughed in his 
sleeve : ' ' All I have to do is to put a little gold braid on my 
virtuous republicans and instantly they become whatever I 
please to make them." 

Men who but yesterday would have bent their necks to the 
guillotine rather than bend their knees to a monarch were as 
supple in their hinges as if their lives had been passed in 
loafing about a throne. Napoleon oscillated between admira- 
tion and contempt for his fawning courtiers, but when he 
chaffed Fouche for having been one of the men who sent 
King Louis XVI to his death he received from the regicide a 
keener thrust: "Yes, Sire; that was the first service I had 
the happiness of rendering to Your Majesty." 



170 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Napoleon's cynicism was touched, too, by the readiness of 
the haughty members of the ancient aristocracy to prostrate 
themselves before the new throne ere its gilding was dry. 
"I showed them the path to glory and they would not tread 
it," he said. "I opened my anteroom and they rushed 
through the door in crowds." Not a few of the old nobles 
and grande dames were eager applicants for palace places. 
They were set to work drilling the awkward squad of the new 
court, teaching the raw recruits from the peasantry and the 
lower middle class the proper way to enter and back out of 
a room, curtsey, speak, manage their trains or hold their hats. 

Encouraged by his success with the stars in the cast, he 
next showered the crosses of the Legion of Honour on the 
chorus and the supernumeraries, when, on the great day of 
the nation, the 14th of July, nobles and hinds knelt before 
him in an equality of vanity. An intoxication of ambition 
for personal glory and selfish reward spread over France, 
which had poured forth the mightiest armies of modern times, 
raised up peasants to be conquerors of dukes and princes, 
and fought all Europe single-handed for ten years with- 
out offering any other prize than the honour of serving 
the Republic in hunger and rags. Now, however, that "Our 
Country" had become "My Empire," "Our Government" 
"My Throne," "Our Army" "My Army," and "We, the 
People," had become "My Subjects," men no longer sweat 
for duty, but only for promotion. The manhood of the nation 
was lost in the mad scramble to receive the new guinea stamp 
of rank. 

Discarding his Corsican ancestry, the new monarch chose 
an entirely different set of forbears. Even the Bourbons 
were not deemed suitable progenitors, and when it was sug- 
gested that he should take the old title of King of France, he 
remarked, "I do not succeed Louis XIV, but Charlemagne." 
Accordingly he solemnly made an imperial progress to the 
tomb of his new-found and illustrious forefather at Aix la 
Chapelle. 

Having chosen the great Emperor of the Franks as his 
ancestor, he determined to imitate the principal feature of the 



TWICE CKOWNED 171 

Carlovingian coronation and be anointed by the Vicar of 
Christ. He would even better the example. Charlemagne 
went to Rome to be crowned in St. Peter's by Leo III. The 
new Charlemagne made Rome come to Paris and Pius VII 
crown him in Notre Dame. 

The grey walls of Notre Dame had risen for 600 years and 
more from the "Island of the City," where, in the middle 
of the Seine, Cassar found a cluster of savage huts that con- 
stituted the Paris of twenty centuries ago. A jumble of old 
buildings shut in the great cathedral and Napoleon ordered 
those structures to be torn down right and left to clear the 
way for the imperial procession. The work of demolition was 
pressed by day and night. New platforms and galleries were 
hastily erected within the church. Streets were paved and 
all Paris was filled with the chorus of hammers. 

Workmen took advantage of the great demand for labour 
to extort unheard-of wages, amounting to as much as 65, 75, 
and even 80 cents a day. Dressmakers, tailors, and milliners, 
goldsmiths, and jewellers did a rushing business. 

The making of crests, a lost art since the Revolution, 
flourished once more. Napoleon adopted the eagle of Charle- 
magne for the standards of his legions and the bee as his per- 
sonal emblem, scattering swarms of bees over his ensign and 
escutcheon, his palace carpets and draperies. The only me- 
mento of his native Corsica that appears to have interested 
him was its emblematic colour, green, which he adopted for 
the livery of the Empire, a choice that is perpetuated to this 
day in the national flag of Italy. 

Isabey, the artist, was ordered, on the eve of the coronation, 
to prepare seven drawings in colours of the seven scenes to be 
enacted at Notre Dame. It was an impossible feat within 
the limits of time. But the resourceful artist purchased all 
the dolls in Paris and, dressing them up as Emperor, Empress, 
Pope, princes, chamberlains, equerries, ladies of honour, and 
the rest, he arranged them on a little stage that was a minia- 
ture of the church interior. Napoleon was delighted with 
this clever plan and, calling in the various actors and actresses 
in his cast, he personally taught them their proper positions. 



172 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

A grave crisis arose as the Pope neared Paris in his journey 
from Rome over the newly constructed Mt. Cenis highway. 
Where and how should His Majesty receive His Holiness? 
In his new exaltation Napoleon was extremely anxious not to 
place himself in a position where he would have to take second 
place even to the Pope. It was decided, in keeping with the 
merely theatrical character of the entire coronation, that he 
should go hunting and meet the Pope informally and by 
chance. 

While pretending to be taking part in a hunt in the im- 
perial forest of Fontainebleau he affected to be surprised by 
the arrival of the papal party, numbering more than one hun- 
dred persons. He dismounted, the Pope stepped out of his 
carriage, and they embraced, after which one of the imperial 
carriages drove up. The Emperor entered it before the Pope, 
but he took the seat on the fail her side, which procedure had 
its compensation for the Pontiff, since it left him the seat on 
the right. 

Pius, an amiable and benevolent character, was determined 
to make the best of every situation and not to bicker with 
the Emperor. Although he had supposed that his long jour- 
ney was for the purpose of placing the crown on Napoleon's 
head, he cheerfully consented to let him crown himself, as the 
Emperor was determined to receive the crown from no other 
hands than his own. When he recoiled from the communion 
as a sacrilege, since he could not partake of it in a spirit of 
sincerity, the Pontiff consented to its omission, respecting his 
scruples, probably glad to find he had any in church matters. 

The Pope was immovable, however, on questions that he re- 
garded as moral, and carried his point every time. There 
was one very important condition which he insisted upon from 
the outset. Napoleon had resolved upon having Josephine 
crowned, although none of the Bourbon queens had received 
such an honour since Marie de Medici 200 years before. 

Yet he had no wife in the eyes of the church, his wedding 
having taken place in the Revolution, when there were no 
religious marriages in France. The Pope firmly announced 
that unless he and Josephine went through a religious cere- 



TWICE CROWNED 173 

mony the church could have no part in her coronation. The 
imperial will was slow to bend, but in the end and only on 
the eve of the coronation Napoleon and Josephine knelt before 
Cardinal Fesch. 

After eight years their union had received the sanction of 
the church and the Empress no doubt rose from the Cardinal's 
blessing with a new feeling of security, for was not the Em- 
peror bound to her now by a tie that no man could put asun- 
der? Napoleon's desire to have her crowned, however, would 
seem to be assurance enough that he had yet no intention of 
sundering it, and as his thoughts harked back to their first 
wedding he laughed at the notary, now the imperial notary, 
who had advised Josephine against marrying a man with 
nothing but a cloak and a sword; the cloak had been dyed 
purple and the sword was Charlemagne 's ! 

As they were breakfasting on the morning of the great day, 
December 2, 1804, Napoleon placed the crown on Josephine's 
head that he might enjoy the pretty sight over their coffee 
and rolls. The Pope was already starting for Notre Dame, 
with his cross bearer riding ahead on a mule in accordance 
with the ancient papal custom. 

It was ten o'clock when Murat led the carbineers, cuiras- 
siers, chasseurs, and the mamelukes — reminders of the Egyp- 
tian campaign — out of the courtyard of the Tuileries, followed 
by the heralds at arms and the carriages of the masters of the 
ceremonies, the grand officers of the Empire, the great digni- 
taries and the princesses. 

Then in solitary state, came a gilded carriage with a crown 
atop, its eight horses in resplendent harnesses driven by Cassar, 
the coachman, who had galloped to safety past the infernal 
machine. Pages in green and gold were perched behind, 
while all about pranced the horses of the aides-de-camp. 
Within sat Napoleon, two white aigrettes nodding above his 
black velvet cap, surrounded with a band of diamonds, clasped 
together by the celebrated $2,000,000 Regent solitaire. His 
purple cloak showed its white satin lining as it hung from his 
left shoulder, and beneath it was a coat of purple velvet faced 
with white and glittering with gems and gold. His waistcoat 



174 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

was buttoned with diamonds, while gold embroidered white 
velvet breeches reached to the diamond garters of his gold 
embroidered silk stockings, whose clocks bore the imperial 
coronet. His $80 pair of velvet boots with diamond buckles 
were white as snow and gleaming with gold. 

No operatic tenor could have outshone the Little Corporal 
that proud day, when he exulted to his brother, "Joseph, if 
father could only see us ! " Yet mother did not deign to be a 
looker-on at the show! 

Beside the Emperor sat Josephine, in whose smiling face 
no trace of age had been left by her skilful maids. Her white 
satin gown was trimmed with silver and gold and sprinkled 
over with golden bees. Diamonds sparkled on her head, on 
her neck, in her ears and in her girdle. Facing the imperial 
couple were the Princes Joseph and Louis. 

The 80,000 soldiers assembled in the city for the corona- 
tion, left little room in the streets for the people who were 
not largely represented, and seldom was a cheer raised. 

As Napoleon passed the Church of St. Roch in the Rue St. 
Honore he could see the first flight in the steps he was climb- 
ing to the throne ; for by those steps of St. Roch, the Man on 
Horseback became master of Paris nine years before. 

In the archbishop's palace by the cathedral, the imperial 
couple changed to their coronation costumes, Napoleon put- 
ting on a circlet of gold laurel leaves and getting into a white 
satin petticoat! Next he donned an eighty-pound purple 
robe and cape, ermine lined and covered with golden bees, 
while Josephine put on a highly embroidered velvet mantle, 
twenty ells in length, and with $2000 worth of ermine for its 
lining. This robe, which was draped to leave her bust un- 
covered and her figure free, was fastened to her left shoulder 
and held in place by a clasp at her golden girdle studded with 
rose coloured gems. Her crown had eight branches, set with 
diamonds, banded by eight large emeralds, while amethysts 
shone from the bandeau on her brow, and four rows of mag- 
nificent pearls, entwined with diamond covered leaves formed 
her diadem. In all she wore on her pretty head $250,000 
worth of pearls and diamonds. 



TWICE CROWNED 175 

Meanwhile the great throng of nearly twenty thousand 
shivered in the cold cathedral as they waited and watched for 
the next scene to be enacted within its walls, where in less 
than a decade the "torch of truth" had blazed on the vener- 
able altar and a ballet dancer had been enthroned in the choir 
to be worshipped as the ' ' goddess of reason. ' ' 

Probably no other bosom in the immense assemblage felt 
the same emotions as that which had nursed the Emperor. 
For he had not forgotten his foster mother but had brought 
Camilla Ilari from Corsica and installed her in a post of 
honour where she could see her "little Nabulionello" put on 
the crown of empire. 

It was almost noon, when at last the heralds and pages ap- 
peared at the portal of the church, followed by the marshals 
of the Empire. Those war dogs of the fallen Republic came 
in with mincing steps, one laden with a cushion on which lay 
Josephine's ring, another a basket for her cloak, another her 
crown on a cushion. 

Then entered Josephine, her imperial self, between her first 
chamberlain and her first equerry, with the Bonaparte prin- 
cesses holding up her robe and looking like captives at a 
chariot's wheel. Walking behind with courtly tread was 
Mine, de Lavelette, daughter of that Fanny Beauharnais who 
had befriended Josephine when she was the neglected wife 
of Fanny's nephew, and a stranger in France. Beside her 
marched an uncomely, unfortunate hunchback, but this was 
Mme. de la Rochefaucauld and perhaps the only person in the 
entire imperial suite who ever had stepped foot in the old 
court of France. 

Next there came more war dogs carrying Napoleon's trin- 
kets, and then the Emperor, grasping in one of his gold-em- 
broidered gloves "the hand of justice," while in the other he 
held the sceptre with an eagle perched on top of it. Joseph 
and Louis, Cambaceres and LeBrun followed him as they held 
up his burdensome robe, and the cry of "Vive l'Empereur!" 
rang through the groined aisles of the vast and lofty edifice. 

As Napoleon made his bow to the Pope he touched the gos- 
pels with both hands. Then he and Josephine descended and 



176 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

knelt at the foot of the altar, where the Pontiff anointed 
their heads and hands. The Emperor put on his ring, sword 
and crown, and next bent over to crown the Empress who 
was kneeling at his feet. The religious ceremony was finished 
with a kiss from the Pope on Napoleon's cheek and his bene- 
diction, "May the Emperor live forever!" 

A herald-at-arms now proclaimed "the most glorious and 
august Emperor Napoleon," who, however, was still boyish 
enough to prod uncle Fesch with his sceptre as he was leaving 
the scene. 

The grandiose spectacle was at an end. Soon Notre Dame 
was wrapped again in the solemn stillness of the centuries, 

Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, 
And marching single in an endless file. 

Only a solitary lamp lit the dusk of the waning day in the 
great nave, haunted by the ghostly past, where above all the 
echoes of the ages there still resounds Pius' invocation, "Vivat 
Imperator in eternum. " 

At Napoleon's appearance in Milan in May, 1805, to be 
crowned King of Italy, the Milanese outdid the Parisians at 
his French coronation. No recollection of heavy sacrifices in 
a great revolution for the overthrow of a monarchy cast its 
shadow upon the Italians as they rejoiced at the setting up 
of a new throne. Besides, was not their new sovereign an 
Italian like themselves? 

To grace the brow of the new King of Italy the famous 
crown of the Lombards was brought forth. That precious 
heirloom of the ages is jealously guarded behind no less than 
six locks in a casket with doors of silver and steel beneath a 
marble canopy in the cathedral of the royal town of Monza, 
a few miles out of Milan. There curious pilgrims may mount 
a platform and look down upon the rude coronet of the Long- 
beards, all gold and gems except for a slender inner band of 
iron, which tradition says was made from a nail of the 
Saviour's crucifixion. 

It was not in that simple old church of Monza, however, 
that Napoleon was consecrated, but with all pomp in the beau- 



TWICE CROWNED 177 

tiful cathedral of Milan, from whose noble altar he took the 
iron crown to place it upon his head with his own hands 

So pleased was he with his performance in that last scene 
of his great spectacular drama that he exclaimed on returning 
to the palace, "Well, did you see the ceremony? Did you 
hear what I said when I placed the crown on my head?" 
And he lifted his voice in imitation of the tones that had rung 
through the cathedral, "God has given it to me. Woe to him 
who shall touch it ! " 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE UNCONQUERED SEA 

1801-1805 AGE 32-36 

THE green lea that crowns with the velvet turf of Eng- 
land the chalk cliffs of Folkestone is hardly lost to the 
view of the passengers by the steamer that is bearing 
them to the shore of France, when they see a tall and beautiful 
Doric column rising from the sand dunes of Boulogne. That 
shining white obelisk is the boundary stone of the Empire of 
Napoleon, and on its top stands the bronze effigy of the man 
who spent fifteen years of his life in a futile effort to cross 
the English Channel. 

As the boat draws nearer the end of its voyage from the 
English isle to the continent of Europe, the ruined tower of 
Caligula is seen on the brow of the yellow heights, where the 
legionaries of Rome planted it in the fortieth year of the 
Christian era. Hard by, the conscripts of Napoleon reared 
for him a timbered palace in the third year of the nineteenth 
century, where he could dwell in the midst of his nearly two 
hundred thousand warriors who were ready at his nod to bear 
him on their arms into the palace of St. James. And down 
alongside the quay, where the Folkestone steamer now ties up, 
1000 boats waited to ferry them over the twenty-nine miles of 
water that rolled between them and their goal. Some of the 
craft are afloat to this day, the barelegged fisherwomen of the 
old town insist, and are numbered among their herring fleet. 
But they have never crossed the channel and grated on an 
English beach ! 

The Peace of Amiens, which really was no peace at all, but 
a mere truce in an age-old, irrepressible conflict between 
France and England, had lasted less than fourteen months, 
when the clash of arms was renewed. It was only the resump- 

178 



THE UNCONQUERED SEA 179 

tion of a vendetta which had embroiled the two countries since 
the Norman conquest and in pursuit of which they had hunted 
each other to the ends of the earth, from the Ganges to the 
St. Lawrence and from Yorktown to Acre. 

When, like two winded pugilists, they agreed in the Treaty 
of Amiens to lay aside the gloves after ten years in the ring, 
the old score was left unsettled, with one the mistress of the 
ocean, with one the master of the land and each at the mercy 
of the other. The French shore was England's door stoop 
on the European continent, while the British Isles and the 
British rock of Gibraltar were the gateposts on the lanes that 
led from France to the highway of the sea. 

England, with immense dominions beyond the ocean, had 
all but stripped the French of their once great colonial em- 
pire, while France dominated Europe as never before. 

The British protested against Napoleon's annexation of 
Piedmont and his active influence in Switzerland, where he 
was making over the Swiss Confederation into the modern 
republic that we know to-day. The jealousy of the London 
statesmen was aroused to the greenest hue when they saw him, 
by invitation of the German states, acting as mediator be- 
tween them, and remaking the map of Germany. 

In the midst of the quarrel, England had faithfully carried 
out her treaty agreement to restore the Cape of Good Hope 
to the Dutch and relinquish Egypt to the Turks. She also 
sent home at her own expense the remnant of Napoleon's 
Egyptian army, which she had captured when she took the 
country. She continued, however, to hold on to Malta, and 
Napoleon insisted that England must not remain in control 
of that key to the eastern Mediterranean. 

In the end, the controversy thus narrowed down to the pos- 
session of a barren rock twenty miles long and nine miles wide. 
In the temper that had been aroused on both sides any bone 
would suffice to bring on a fight. 

The war began in Josephine's salon at the Tuileries one 
Sunday afternoon. "When Napoleon entered the circle which 
had formed in the drawing-room, he walked up to Robert R. 
Livingston, the American minister, and made a few pleasant 



180 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

remarks, after which he strode over to Lord Whitworth, the 
British ambassador. ' ' So, ' ' he demanded of the Briton in his 
deepest tone, ''you are determined to go to war?" 

A diplomat being a gentleman who is sent abroad to lie 
for his country, the ambassador insisted, of course, that his 
nation was only desirous of peace. But the First Consul, in 
angry accents, insisted that England was not keeping her 
promises and was plotting to bring on hostilities. "Why these 
preparations for war?" he sternly inquired. "Against whom 
are you taking these measures? . . . But if you arm, I shall 
also arm. If you will fight, I shall also fight. You may pos- 
sibly destroy France, but you never can intimidate her!" 
As the First Consul left the room, he repeated, "Woe to them 
who do not respect their treaties!" 

When the door closed behind him, it closed upon the Peace 
of Amiens and the peace of the world. Thus began, in the 
spring of 1803, the titanic war which was to draw into its vor- 
tex all the nations, until the battle line should stretch from 
Moscow to Detroit, and end only at Waterloo in 1815. 

Shortly after the opening of hostilities, Napoleon pitched his 
camp at Boulogne in sight of the chalk cliffs of Albion and for 
two years he bent his giant energies to the formation of the 
mightiest invading fleet ever launched against England. 
Boasting that he would "jump the ditch," he declared that 
Caesar's expedition was "child's play," and that "mine is 
the enterprise of the Titans. ' ' The Roman had only 800 boats 
but the Corsican commanded that there should be built for 
him no less than 2000 boats. 

In one respect and the most important, the latest invader 
could not claim any superiority to that first recorded invader 
of England. After 1800 years had passed since Caesar's in- 
vasion, Napoleon still must depend on sails and oars to carry 
him across the channel, as the invention of aerial, steam and 
submarine navigation was then only faintly dawning. 

While Robert Fulton, with his plans for steamboats and 
torpedoes, vainly offered his inventions to the two powers that 
were struggling for the mastery of the waters, Napoleon's ship- 
yards were busily launching his cockle shells and he restlessly 



THE UNCONQUERED SEA 181 

moved up and down the coast, which he lined from Havre to 
Antwerp with sentries, cannon and telegraphic semaphores. 
The "Army of England," as he called his invading force, was 
daily put through drills in embarking and disembarking until 
every man knew his boat and his place in it and 25,000 could 
clamber aboard in ten minutes. 

On the other side the channel, the "Great Terror" held 
England in its grip. Had not this Corsican imp raced twice 
through British fleets over the 1400 miles of blue water be- 
tween France and Egypt? Had he not leaped the Alps? 
Could a few miles of sea set bounds to his activity? 

AVhile the credulous peasantry shivered as they listened to 
stories of his having already landed and, like a wild man, 
secreted himself in the haunted depths of the neighbouring 
woods, where he only awaited his good time to pounce upon 
them, the King "in daily expectation that Bonaparte will at- 
tempt his threatened invasion," as George III wrote, made 
provision for the flight of the royal family beyond the Severn. 
The army of defence was quickly swollen to 300,000 and 
400,000 by zealous patriots determined to make good Bri- 
tannia's dearest boast that "Britons never shall be slaves," 
and when the supply of muskets was exhausted by the volun- 
teers, they grasped pikes, and even pitchforks. 

Huge piles of combustibles were made ready to be turned 
into bonfires as a signal of the approach of the nation's ogre. 
Forts sprang up about London, and some of the seventy -five 
martello watch towers which were erected on the coast still 
may be seen. 

All the while a cordon of British ships of war, ' ' those raven- 
ing wolves of the sea," as Napoleon called them, was drawn 
about the terrified land. But there was not a French naval 
vessel afloat in the Channel. The French warships were all 
sealed up in the harbours of the Atlantic and the Mediter- 
ranean, with English blockading fleets at every harbour mouth. 

How, then, could an army cross the Channel and land on 
the English shore ? History cannot keep a straight face while 
recording Napoleon's solution of the problem. "Eight hours 
of calm or fog," he said, "will decide the fate of the uni- 



182 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

verse." If the waters would be still that long, he argued 
that his invading hosts could row across while the British 
ships lay becalmed and helpless spectators of his descent upon 
the doomed island. On the other hand, if fortune should 
choose to cover the waters with a fog, he contended that his 
2000 boats could dodge through the enemy's fleet. 

Some historians rejecting all that mad folly, which Na- 
poleon talked for two years as he paced to and fro beside his 
telescope levelled at Dover castle, have persuaded themselves 
that his whole scheme of invasion was a mere ruse to enable 
him to marshal his forces for the campaign which came to a 
climax at Austerlitz. But there is evidence enough that be- 
neath his nonsense about rowing or dodging into England 
he concealed an elaborate plan for assembling a great naval 
fleet that should swoop down upon the British men-of-war 
and sweep a passage for his army. 

"Leave it to me," he said as he kept his secret locked in his 
breast. "I will surprise the world by the grandeur and rapid- 
ity of my strokes." To distract the British blockaders of his 
harbours and give his imprisoned naval fleets an opportunity 
to escape, he darkened the air with the cloud of a gigantic 
deception. Throwing up fortifications on the southern shore 
of Italy and marching thousands of soldiers down the penin- 
sula, he lured Nelson away from Toulon, out of which the 
French fleet stole and sailed unopposed through the Straits 
of Gibraltar. Assembling an army of 20,000 in the west of 
France, with a noisy pretence that it was destined for Ireland, 
he hoped thus to distract the British blockading ships off 
Brest, enable his own vessels to slip out of that harbour and, 
joining the Toulon fleet, suddenly fall upon the Channel 
squadron of the British. 

"The English know not what awaits them," he remarked 
enigmatically to his suite when he heard of the escape of his 
Toulon battleships. "If we have the power of crossing for 
but twelve hours England will be no more." But as he 
waited in vain for his ships to come, he asked for even less 
time and pleaded with fate, "Let us be masters of the Channel 
for six hours and we shall be masters of the world." 



THE UNCONQUERED SEA 183 

Still his prudent commander at Brest held back. "Start, 
start at once!" he commanded and implored him. "In your 
hands are the destinies of the world." But his fleets did not 
appear on the bare western horizon. On the contrary, his 
Toulon ships had already run into Cadiz and the British 
watchdogs never took their eyes off the rest of his vessels. 

With gloom and anger clouding his brow, Napoleon paced 
the sandy bounds of the unconquered sea and bitterly mut- 
tered to himself in his impotent rage, "The English will be- 
come very small when France shall have two or three admirals 
willing to die." But Mars had failed to snatch the trident 
from Neptune. The master of the land had been thwarted by 
the mistress of the sea. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

THE FALL OF VIENNA 

1805 AGE 36 

WHEN Napoleon raised his camp at Boulogne at the 
end of the summer of 1805, he turned his back upon 
England in a retreat from her invincible strong- 
hold, the sea, but only to strike her down, if he could, amid 
the hills of Germany. He marched away to conquer the coast 
of Europe and, sealing every harbour against British trade, 
leave England marooned in her fog. 

Thenceforth he battled to that end alone, whether in Aus- 
tria or in Germany or in Spain or in Russia. All the Na- 
poleonic wars had no other object than this. They were not 
for the conquest of lands, but of harbours. England had 
closed the sea to France and France would close the continent 
to her. "To live without commerce, without fleets, without 
colonies and subject to the unjust will of an enemy," Na- 
poleon said in his proclamation at the opening of the war, "is 
not to live like Frenchmen." 

He made war to win for France dominions beyond the sea, 
while England made war to protect the foundations she was 
only then laying of that world-wide British Empire which 
finally was won at Waterloo. The destiny of Asia, Africa, 
and Australia, and, perhaps, the Americas was determined on 
the battlefields of Europe. 

The allies of France and England changed sides from cam- 
paign to campaign, but the two principals in the long and 
bloody duel remained the same. They are the rival powers, 
always contending for the mastery of the world, England with 
her ships and her wealth, France with the sword of Napoleon, 
which was no more than a weapon borrowed for this earth- 

184 



THE PALL OF VIENNA 185 

shaking struggle between conflicting national impulses that 
swept over Europe like wrestling tides. 

It was an irrepressible conflict. Many historians, transpos- 
ing cause and effect, represent it as a war for the advancement 
of one man's personal ambition. But it began while Napoleon 
was yet idling in Corsica. It would have gone on to the end 
had he never stepped foot on the shores of France. Had the 
French found a leader less resourceful, doubtless the final de- 
cision would have been more quickly rendered. But, on the 
other hand, the result might not have been so decisive and 
lasting. 

It is a libel on mankind to say that all the nations which 
Napoleon led to the slaughter, year after year for ten years, 
followed him merely to flatter his self-conceit and poured out 
their blood only to feed his appetite for power. He was but 
the agent of a mighty force that swept kings and peoples on 
its irresistible current. The glory of the Alexanders, the 
Cassars, and the Napoleons is no more than the foam on the 
breakers of the great movements of men. But by watching 
them we may best mark the rise and fall of the surging waves 
of human history. 

The chief monarchies of Europe leagued themselves for the 
overthrow of the French Republic in 1792 and again in 1799. 
A third coalition was formed, in 1805, to take from the Em- 
pire the conquests it had inherited from the Republic. Of all 
those coalitions England was the soul and the purse. The 
French could not fight her on the seas, but she could fight 
them on the land, not always with English soldiers, perhaps, 
but with her pounds, shillings and pence, and with the dogged 
persistence of her national character. 

The ruling passion of Austria and her Emperor, Francis I, 
was to recover in Italy and Germany the rich provinces they 
had lost in two disastrous wars with France. Russia was im- 
pelled by a national ambition to make herself the foremost 
power in Europe and by the vanity of her youthful Czar, 
Alexander I, to make himself the arbiter of the nations. 
Meanwhile Prussia timidly held back and disappointed the 
Allies. 



186 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The alliance was completed and the campaign outlined early 
in August. The Allies adopted, however, the old familiar 
plan of Napoleon's enemies, conceived in their overweening 
desire to make war without taking the chances of war. 
Their unchanging idea was to play the game safe and 
make success certain. They never ventured to hurl them- 
selves upon Napoleon in full force and stake everything 
on one campaign for his complete overthrow. He used 
therefore regularly to lay down for the information of his 
generals this proposition : ' ' The enemy, in the Austrian man- 
ner, will make three attacks. Ignore two of them, and throw 
yourselves with all your forces on the third." 

Now the Allies, under Austrian influence, were still further 
dividing their strength to make several attacks upon him, first 
on the banks of the Danube in Germany; second, in Hanover; 
third, in northern Italy, and fourth, in southern Italy. 
Moreover they sought to strike him while his back was turned 
and he was pacing the shore at Boulogne, still absorbed in his 
project for invading England. 

An Austrian armj', therefore, stealthily moved up the 
Danube at the end of August, and a Russian army promised 
to hasten forward in time to join it by October 20; but the 
Austrians failed to take account of the interesting fact that 
the Russian calendar is twelve days behind theirs. An even 
more serious miscalculation was made by the wise men of 
Vienna. They reckoned that Napoleon would not wake up 
from his dream of capturing England until it was so late that 
he could not possibly hurry an army to meet the allied forces 
by the Danube before November 10. 

AVatching him closely, while their army silently crept 
toward his frontier, they flattered themselves that he remained 
oblivious to his peril. They were delighted to see him 
dawdling away his days at Boulogne or at St. Cloud in seem- 
ing idleness; but he was whispering, however, that it was a 
time to appear pusillanimous. 

The Paris papers contained no mention of the impending 
war or of the movement of hostile forces toward France. Nor 
were they permitted to hint that the Emperor had lifted his 



THE FALL OF VIENNA 187 

camp at Boulogne, had headed 200,000 Frenchmen toward the 
Rhine, had ordered Bernadotte to march the French army of 
occupation out of Hanover for the purpose of joining the 
Grand Army and had directed two minor armies in Italy to 
parry the attacks aimed at him there. 

When in due time his armies were at the Rhine, he sud- 
denly cut off the outer world from France so that not a hint 
of military movements should escape to the enemy. No for- 
eign mails were permitted to leave the country. Even the 
despatches of the ambassadors at Paris were held up, and not 
a horse was allowed to go across the frontier unless he carried 
an army courier. France became in a day a land of im- 
penetrable silence, under cover of which her army crossed the 
Rhine late in September. 

The army which sped over the Rhine had undergone many 
changes in the more than two years since Napoleon first mar- 
shalled it on the sandy heights of Boulogne. It had been 
trained by master hands in a great school of war, from which 
it went forth the best drilled, the most magnificent military 
body the world had ever seen. Its brilliant accoutrements 
were unstained by service in the field, and its soldiers in their 
queues, many of them wearing ear-rings, were as fresh and 
spirited as colts dashing out of a pasture. 

Yet they were not strangers to battle. For although no 
foe had ventured in five years to meet triumphant France in 
combat, a full half of those 200,000 were battle veterans, and 
a fourth of them had fought through all the victorious wars 
of the Republic for ten years. 

The very name of the organisation was changed. It ceased 
to be the Army of England when it turned its face from the 
sea toward Germany and became the Grand Army, bearing 
aloft on its standards for the first time the imperial eagles, 
which it was thenceforth to follow from Boulogne to "Water- 
loo, but which, after all, is only an easy march of 125 miles ! 

Moreover, while it tarried by the shore of the English Chan- 
nel, the army had experienced a deeper change, a change of 
allegiance. It had lost its soul, and a new spirit had stolen 
through the ranks of those one time republican warriors. 



188 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

They had come together in the name of the French people, 
but they marched to war now in the name of one man. An 
idol had displaced an ideal in their devotion and they felt 
no more the old stirrings of patriotism in their blood. 

Never again were they to fight for their country and for 
themselves, but ever after for their Emperor and his Empire. 
They marched and battled no longer to carry liberty to others, 
but to win glory for themselves, for had not every man of 
them been promised a marshal's baton in his knapsack? 
Where a generous if fanatical passion for freedom had glowed 
in their breasts, personal ambition now ruled. 

True, they still bore in a silver case the heart of La Tour 
d'Auvergne, that Bayard of the Revolution, that spartan sol- 
dier of the Republic, who despised rank, scorned promotion 
and accepted no other reward for his valour than the simple 
title of the first grenadier of France. On their rolls they still 
carried his name as a synonym of modest, unselfish love of 
country. At every roll-call of the 46th demi-brigade there 
still rang out the name of La Tour d'Auvergne and the 
solemn response of the oldest grenadier: "Dead on the field 
of honour. ' ' 

As the Grand Army marched by his grave in Bavaria — 
another French Republic has since given his bones sepulture 
in the Invalides at Paris — it was with ranks closed, drums 
beating and swords lifted. Yet, for all that now meaning- 
less ritual, the spirit of La Tour d'Auvergne was as dead 
among the soldiers who pressed after the eagles of Napoleon as 
the France for which he had given his life. 

Napoleon's bulletins themselves reflected the change that 
had come over France and the army. The conquering watch- 
words of his Italian campaign, "Liberty, Fraternity, Equal- 
ity," were discarded. It was enough for him to say to his 
army now, "Soldiers, your Emperor is in the midst of you," 
and to bid the nation, "let 100,000 more Frenchmen come 
and range themselves under my flags." 

"My soldiers are my children," the one-time sons of the 
Revolution were flattered to be told by the Emperor. Yet 
they looked upon him more as a comrade than as a father. 



THE FALL OF VIENNA 189 

He was still their "Little Corporal" in the same simple uni- 
form and three-cornered black hat that he wore when only a 
general of the Republic. 

None of the old moustaches, a high officer tells us, would 
have dared to speak to the lowest sublieutenant with the free- 
dom they showed to Napoleon himself as he went his nightly 
round of the bivouac, stopping to talk with the men by their 
camp fires, asking them what they were cooking in their steam- 
ing pots and smiling with amusement at jesting familiarities 
which he would not have tolerated among his marshals. Those 
dignitaries were not permitted to take the slightest liberties, 
and were required to show themselves duly humble in the 
imperial presence. They had their reward, for Napoleon's 
obligations to them were amply repaid with money and rank. 

But to the poor multitude who were fighting his battles for 
five sous a day he presented himself as a kindly friend and 
powerful champion. He would listen to the complaint of any 
private in the ranks against his superiors, and he abolished 
flogging in his earliest campaigns, although until then Europe 
never had seen an army move except under the lash. 

He did not pretend to feed his soldiers, however, for he re- 
fused to encumber himself with magazines of supplies or 
burden the French taxpayers with the cost of maintaining 
the army. The men were turned loose on the people of the 
war-stricken lands, to forage for themselves. They ravaged 
the shops, the cottages, the gardens, and dug up with their 
bayonets the little potato patches of the peasantry. 

Although they were moving through friendly countries and 
not in the land of the enemy, no attention was paid to the 
infuriated outcries of the devastated inhabitants. Napoleon 
calmly assured his generals that the people really did not care 
if they were robbed, and it was a saying among the soldiers 
that ' ' a man is like a sheaf of wheat ; the more you beat him 
the more he yields." Accordingly, the peasants were mauled 
until they gave up their last copper. 

As the French marched through Germany in the rain and 
sleet and mud of a cold October, they stripped the villages as 
they went, leaving them bare for the rear columns. Some- 



190 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

times the hindmost floundered through the muddy roads for 
days without coming upon a pig, chicken or even a loaf of 
bread. But it was part of Napoleon's military calculations 
that as long as their legs lasted, hungry soldiers marched 
fastest, spurred on, as they were, by their eagerness to find 
something to eat. 

The army, having crossed the Rhine at five different points, 
descended upon the unsuspecting enemy like the five out- 
spread members of a monstrous hand prepared to grasp its 
prey. Napoleon had brought his forces into the theatre of 
war full seven weeks before his enemies had supposed it pos- 
sible for him to confront them. 

Meanwhile General Mack, the Austrian commander, was sit- 
ting down by the Danube within the fortifications of the old 
town of Ulm, on the borders of Bavaria and Wiirtemberg, 
quietly and confidently awaiting the arrival of his Russian 
Allies. Once the allied armies had come together, they 
planned to go forth to meet the belated French in the Black 
Forest. For, of course, Napoleon would come through the 
forest. French armies always had come that way. 

Looking straight ahead, certain that Napoleon was intend- 
ing to attack him squarely in front, Mack had no eyes for 
Ney, Lannes, Soult, Davout, and Marmont, on his right, as 
their columns were bending toward him from the north. 
"When their presence did dawn upon his understanding at last, 
he thought they must be engaged in some other campaign, 
perhaps against Bohemia ! Soon he turned to find that the 
foe, instead of being before him, had got in behind him. For 
120,000 French, having crossed the Danube without encoun- 
tering resistance, were barring both the Russian line of ad- 
vance and the Austrian line of retreat to Vienna. Prisoners 
were gathered in by the thousands, often without having an 
opportunity to offer the least defence. 

Ulm quickly became a cage, with from 25,000 to 27,000 
white coats and 800 guns caught in it. The leaden skies which 
had lowered upon the beleaguered town, burst into a mocking 
smile at its fall and a brilliant sun beamed upon the con- 
queror as he stood on the hillside at the northern gate in the 



THE FALL OF VIENNA 191 

midst of his dazzling staff to receive the surrender of the 
stronghold. While the captive army silently marched out to 
fling its arms at the feet of Napoleon, the victorious French 
filled the valley of the Danube with their gloating cry, "Vive 
l'Empereur !" 

The campaign of Ulm was at an end. An Austrian army 
of perhaps eighty thousand men had been smashed in three 
weeks, and altogether above fifty thousand prisoners had been 
taken. The world stood astounded by the rapidity and com- 
pleteness of Napoleon's success, which he seemed to have won 
by wizardry. 

As the new Emperor drained the cup of victory, however, 
he found a bitter draught mingled with its sweetness. For 
the day after the fall of Ulm, the Battle of Trafalgar was 
fought off the coast of Spain. Nelson, dying victorious in the 
cockpit of his flagship, had won for England a supremacy 
on the sea which left her absolutely unchallenged in European 
waters for 109 years when, in 1914, another Emperor threw 
down the gauge. 

Swallowing the bitter draught of Trafalgar, Napoleon, with 
redoubled determination, turned anew to conquer England on 
the land. As he marched on Vienna at full speed, the Aus- 
trian imperial family and aristocracy took flight. The Em- 
peror Francis' fourteen-year-old daughter, the Archduchess 
Marie Louise, found herself once more, as eight years before, 
driven by Napoleon from her palace home. The girlish wan- 
derer among the castles of Hungary and Galicia wrote a 
friend from one of her refuges: "God must be very wroth 
with us. Our family is all scattered ; my dear parents are at 
Olmutz; we are at Kaschan; there is a third colony at Of en. " 
But she strove to keep up her courage with the philosophic 
assurance that "the time must come when the usurper will 
lose heart. Perhaps God has let him go so far to make his 
ruin more complete, when He shall have abandoned him." 

When the conqueror appeared in front of the walls of 
Vienna, in November, the very walls which 120 years before 
had stood like a dike to stop a flood of Turks from pouring 
over Christendom, the gates of the city were opened to him 



192 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

without waiting for him to knock. Without firing a shot, he 
had become the master of a city with a population of 100,000 
inside the walls and large suburbs lying outside its forti- 
fications. For the first time, he entered the conquered 
capital of a sovereign and made himself at home in the palace 
of a fugitive monarch, Marie Louise's favourite home, the 
lovely Schonbrunn. 

The defenders of Vienna had vanished before him only to 
hasten northward and unite with the Russians among the 
hills of Moravia, where the Czar Alexander and Emperor 
Francis were confidently planning to crush the Corsican up- 
start who had dared to assume the imperial rank. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE SUN OF AUSTERLITZ 

1805 AGE 36 

SOME great battlefields are like some great men; the 
closer you come to them the smaller they appear. 
Austerlitz and the sun of Austerlitz, for example, are 
known to every schoolboy in the western hemisphere. They 
spell success the world round, just as Waterloo is synonymous 
with defeat. Yet the nearer Austerlitz is approached, the 
more obscure it becomes. It is not even a dot on the official 
railway map of Austria. 

At Brunn, in whose Austrian castle Silvio Pellico, the Italian 
patriot-prisoner, wrote his sad and moving tale, ' ' My Prisons, ' ' 
and where Napoleon's army made its headquarters in the open- 
ing winter of 1805, the guide books and the hotel people, with 
all their volubility about the surrounding attractions and 
neighbouring excursions, are reticent concerning Austerlitz, 
fifteen miles away. Even the 3500 inhabitants of the village 
of Austerlitz itself have to think twice before they can call to 
mind the name by which their little town is celebrated on the 
pages of history. For they are mostly Moravians who speak 
the Czechish tongue, and they call their place Slavkova. Thus 
the shining name of Austerlitz, which is dimmer at Vienna 
than it is at San Francisco, vanishes quite at the gates of the 
town. 

Not only is Austerlitz not Austerlitz, but there never was a 
battle of Austerlitz. Not a volley was fired within the limits 
of the town. Two Emperors rode out of the village one De- 
cember morning to wrestle with a third Emperor in front of 
Austerlitz. But they did not fight in the town or for the 

193 



194 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

town. It better suited Napoleon, however, to emphasise his 
victory by naming the battle for the village in which the two 
defeated Emperors had made their headquarters and to write 
his bulletin in the very room from which he drove them forth 
in the snow of a winter 's night. 

Napoleon not only named the battle to please his fancy, but 
he also chose the battle ground and even the battle day. Ar- 
rived at Brunn, the Moravian capital which lies at the foot of 
a castled hill ninety miles north of Vienna, the heir of the 
Revolution loudly clamoured for peace in his appeals to "my 
brother," the heir of Charles V, and "my brother," the heir 
of Peter the Great, who were at the camp of the allied army 
at Olmutz, some fifty miles north and near the Russian fron- 
tier. His eager entreaties, as he shrewdly intended, were mis- 
taken for a craven confession of weakness and fear. And 
they only served to embolden the imperial Allies to give him 
battle, then and there, the very thing he was seeking. 

When he saw the welcome signs that his two "brothers," 
Alexander and Francis, were sufficiently flattered in their 
conceit that they had caught him in a desperate plight and 
saw them preparing to smite him, he galloped out on the road 
to Olmutz for the purpose of getting the lay of the land be- 
tween him and the enemy. Pausing at a point a dozen miles 
to the east of Brunn, he studied the scene in silence. 

In his strategic imagination Napoleon was fighting then the 
battle of Austerlitz, for the field of that great combat was 
spread before him. On the eastern horizon he saw the Little 
Carpathian Mountains rising to form the Hungarian frontier 
forty miles away; but his practised eye lingered on the roll- 
ing plains and gentle hills, little dales and brooks, ponds and 
marshes lying in front of the village of Austerlitz. 

The Allies would come down the road from Olmutz, he 
argued, while his own outposts fell back before their advance 
and steadily drew them on to the battle ground, where his 
forces would be more than half concealed as they crouched 
behind a range of hills west of Austerlitz. Naturally and 
properly the Allies would aim to get around him on the right 






THE SUN OF AUSTERLITZ 195 

or south, in their effort to cut his lines to Vienna and to 
Brunn and place themselves between him and those cities. 

Napoleon, however, relied on their attempting, after the 
fashion of his foes, to do the right thing in the wrong way. 
He knew they would flinch from staking everything on a single 
move and would not have the courage to throw themselves 
upon his right wing in a solid body. In their anxiety to make 
success certain, they would make it impossible by sending only 
a part of their army against his right, while they sent another 
part against his left. 

Moreover, he took note of the fact that their principal move- 
ment would have to be made across a brook and between a 
high hill and some ponds, natural conditions that would aid 
him to retard and embarrass them. And while they were 
striking at his two wings, he would hold the main body of his 
forces in his hand, ready to hurl it like a thunderbolt at their 
centre and thus break their army in two. It would be the 
old story repeated so often on the fields of Napoleon's vic- 
tories. His foes would divide to attack him while he united 
to attack them. 

After he had finished fighting the battle in his fancy, as he 
sat in his saddle on the high road, he turned to his waiting 
and watching staff. "Make a careful note of all these 
heights," he commanded. "It is here you will fight before 
two months are over." His only mistake was that the enemy 
did not wait two months but only two weeks to meet him on 
the ground he had chosen. 

The chief military commanders of the allied armies pru- 
dently counselled the adoption of a waiting policy and de- 
fensive measures until, by making a wide detour, the other 
Austrian army in the south had come to join them. But 
Emperor Francis was impatient to recover his lost capital and 
dominions, and the twenty-eight-year-old Czar was burning 
with eagerness to see a battle, as also were the young nobles 
who surrounded him. Many were certain that Napoleon had 
with him no more than 40,000 men. 

The monarchs, therefore, taking matters in their own un- 



196 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

trained hands, determined to move at once. Soon the Allies 
came upon French outposts along the Brunn road, but these 
fled before them and left the way open to Austerlitz, where 
the two Emperors found a pleasant chateau for their head- 
quarters. 

Napoleon had been riding over the field all day and watch- 
ing the position of the Allies. From the hills behind which 
he had posted most of his 75,000 men he looked across a plain 
to the encampment of the enemy two miles in front of Aus- 
terlitz on the banks of a little river that flows to the west of 
the town. 

Out of the plain between the two armies rose the big, steep 
hill of Pratzen, which any general in Europe, except Na- 
poleon, would have seized upon as an admirable position to 
defend. But he had come to Moravia to destroy an army, not 
to hold a hill. 

He left the hill, therefore, without a man on it in order 
that the Allies might not be diverted from their nicely laid 
plans. He could have delivered "only an ordinary battle," 
from the heights of Pratzen, he informed those marshals who 
were surprised to see him neglect the tempting opportunity 
the hill offered him for the posting of troops and artillery, 
and an "ordinary battle" would necessarily have meant an- 
other battle afterward. 

To Napoleon a war was not a series of sparring matches. 
On the contrary, he went into every battle with the purpose 
of fighting to a finish, and he meant now to end the war with 
one staggering blow over the heart of his foe. "Whatever 
they may say, believe me," so ran a maxim to which he re- 
mained faithful, "a man fights with cannon as with his fists." 

Even while he gazed at the plain the day before the battle, 
he saw the left wing of the allied army pushing all the time 
toward the southerly foot of the hill, and he remarked in a 
tone of quiet rejoicing: "Before to-morrow night that army 
will be mine." It was beginning the operation which would 
expose its heart to his blow. 

So clearly did he foresee the character of the battle, he took 
his entire army into his confidence and in his proclamation, 



THE SUN OF AUSTERLITZ 197 

which was read at the head of every battalion, he made this 
extraordinary announcement : ' ' We occupy a formidable 
position, and while the Russians and Austrians are marching 
to turn my right wing, their flank will lie open to us. ' ' 

That comradic frankness was followed in the proclamation 
by a remarkable pledge. Most commanders, when seeking to 
inspire their men, promise to share their perils. Napoleon 
adopted the opposite course and appealed to his soldiers to 
be his shield, his protectors from danger. This unique bulletin 
is documentary evidence of the affection and loyalty in which 
the Grand Army held its commander-in-chief: "Soldiers, I, 
myself, will direct all your battalions. If with your accus- 
tomed bravery you carry disorder and confusion into the 
enemy's ranks I shall hold myself distant from the fire. But 
should victory for a moment seem doubtful, you shall see your 
Emperor expose himself to the foremost strokes." 

A very dark night fell upon the field. Through the hazy 
mist, Napoleon saw the enemy's lights gleaming dimly; but 
he had the French fires put out in order that his position might 
not be disclosed. His bivouac had been set up on a hill not 
far from the high road, between Brunn and Austerlitz and 
five miles from the headquarters of the Allies. That imperial 
habitation was only a miserable hut made of straw and the 
limbs of trees, with a hole in the roof to let the smoke ascend 
from the fire — it was a cold first of December. 

After a brief sleep in the evening, the Emperor rose to take 
one more view of his own lines and those of his foe. As he 
walked past his silent army, one of his escorts lighted his way 
with a torch. The sentries seeing his face in the flickering 
glare raised a cry of "Vive l'Empereur. " The shout ran 
through the camp and roused the sleeping soldiers from their 
dreams of la Belle France. As they struggled to their feet 
and shook themselves awake, they pulled the straw from their 
beds on the frozen ground and lighting it, tens of thousands 
of torches soon were flaring in the inky blackness of the night, 
while the thunderous cheers of the Grand Army rolled among 
the hills. 

The sudden burst of shouting roused the Russians and Aus- 



198 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

trians and some of their chiefs were alarmed anew lest the 
demonstration were a ruse to cover the retreat of the French. 
But the Grand Army really was celebrating Napoleon 's corona- 
tion. Some one had passed the word that it was the night be- 
fore the anniversary of that event. The Empire was one year 
old and its defenders, while they pranced about the Emperor, 
joined in a joyous celebration of its first birthday. 

In their jubilation, they forgot their hunger, for nothing 
but bread had been issued in forty-eight hours, one huge loaf 
for every eight men. Napoleon, seeing potatoes roasting in a 
fire, stooped over and picked one of them out. As he ate it he 
asked a grenadier between bites, "How do you like these 
pigeons ? " ' ' Humph, ' ' the man replied, ' ' they are better than 
nothing, but too much like Lenten food." "Well, old man," 
the Emperor promised, ' ' help me to dislodge those rascals over 
there and we will have a Mardi Gras at Vienna." 

A grenadier came up and said, "Sire, thou hast no need to 
expose thyself. I promise thee in the name of the grenadiers 
that thou shalt have to fight but with thine eyes and that we 
will bring thee to-morrow the flags and the guns of the Rus- 
sians to celebrate the anniversary of thy crowning." 

As Napoleon returned to his hut on the hill, he exclaimed, 
"This is the finest night of my life!" 

At four o'clock the Emperor was awake again and calling 
for a drink of punch. Constant says that he himself would 
have given the whole Austrian Empire for another hour of 
sleep, but he rose and brewed the punch. Then he dressed 
his master, putting on him the familiar grey overcoat. 

The day of Austerlitz had broken cold and gloomy, with the 
two armies lost in a thick fog. The Grand Army received its 
rations of soup and brandy, and the tumult of tens of thou- 
sands of troops of three empires, with their horses and wagons 
and artillery, soon filled the air as, without seeing where they 
were going, they blindly moved forward over the frosted white 
earth. 

"When, however, the marshals had gathered behind Napoleon, 
a flush spread over the Carpathian horizon. Soon the sun — 
"the sun of Austerlitz" — shone upon them from the blue 



THE SUN OF AUSTEKLITZ 199 

skv As the Emperor stood on the brow of the hill in advance 
^hisfuite and a'one, he eagerly watched the Russmns em erg 
ing from a bank of fog and disappearing m another as the} 
descended into a deep hollow beyond the farther slopes of 
Pratzen They were so near him that without lifting his field 
glass he conld distinguish the cavalry from the infantry 

His forecast of the battle was being verified. To some pass 
inff regiments he exultantly shouted in his rich, full tones 
wfich s nt a thrill through the ranks: "Soldiers we jus 
finish this campaign with a thunderclap that BhaU ^ound the 
nride of our enemies!" The response was a lusty roar ot 
?'^ V e 1'Empereur!" as the men lifted their hats on their 

^jrstliien two men riding in front of a party of horsemen 
Jloped afong the road toward the village of Pratzen, near 
Se foot of the big hill. One was in a black uniform with a 
white plume and seated on a chestnut horse, the after • m 
I white uniform on a black horse. They were the all ed 
Emperors who from their hill of observation close t ►the 
town of Austerlitz had descended upon the field to see for 
themselves the cause of a great confusion among their troops 
The presence of their majesties and the commands they gave 
stirred a tardy movement to occupy the still bare heights of 

^Napoleon saw the Russians climbing the hill, he turned 
in his saddle and, breaking a long silence, quietly inquired 
-Marshal Soult, how much time will you require to reach the 
heights of Pratzen?" "Less than twenty minutes, Sire 
Soul replied. "My troops are ready at the bottom of the 
valley and covered with fog and the bivouac smoke so that the 
enemy cannot see them." 

After a moment's calculation, Napoleon said, In that case, 
let us wait a quarter of an hour more." The longer he per- 
mitted the Allies to go on with the movements that were weak- 
ening their centre, the more he would profit by their mis take 
They were embarked in a faulty operation and it was not tor 
him to show them their error too soon. 

Already he heard the echoes of heavy musketry firing from 



200 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

the direction of his threatened right wing, where Marshal 
Davout was struggling by a brook to check the advance of 
30,000 Russians and Austrians. Other thousands of the enemy 
had been detached to assail the French left along the Brunn 
road. Meanwhile the line of the allied centre grew thinner 
and thinner and gaps had begun to appear in it here and there. 

It was not far from nine o'clock when Napoleon decided that 
the time had come when he must let the Allies see their mistake. 
He had drawn off the glove from his white, feminine right 
hand, and now waving it toward Pratzen, he gave the order to 
storm the heights. Soult's fog-wrapped battalions burst out 
of the valley at the western foot of the hill. Racing up the 
steep slope in overwhelming numbers, they spread panic among 
its Russian defenders, who had only just toiled up the opposite 
side. The Czar's green lines were quickly steadied by rein- 
forcements, but Soult had twenty more battalions at his heels, 
and it was not long until the Russians were tumbled down the 
hill in a demoralised mob, abandoning their cannon where they 
were stalled in the mud of the thawing earth. 

The French were masters of the heights of Pratzen, the 
Gibraltar of the field. Napoleon himself now moved nearer 
the disgarnished centre of the enemy, and as he passed Soult 
he leaned over and, stretching out his arm to embrace him, 
exclaimed, "My dear Marshal, you are the best tactician in 
Europe!" 

The firing line of the Allies was flung out seven miles in 
length when, not far from noon, Napoleon began to make a 
deadly lunge at the enemy's weakened heart, the denuded cen- 
tre. The shock of the onset fell upon a picturesque little vil- 
lage along the line of the railroad that now crosses the battle- 
field on its way from Brunn toward Hungary. There Prince 
Murat and Marshal Bernadotte faced the Grank Duke Con- 
stantine of Russia and there the flower of the martial youth 
of three empires fought. 

The imperial guard of France, the noble guard of Russia 
and the chevalier guards of Austria rolled back and forth over 
the field in the murderous fury of a hand-to-hand combat, a 
French guardsman, shrieking as he savagely ran his sabre 



THE SUN OF AUSTERLITZ 201 

through a young Russian guardsman, "We will give the ladies 
of St. Petersburg something to cry for. ' ' 

After horrible sacrifices, the remnant of the noble and the 
chevalier guards fled before the Gallic fury, and Murat raced 
up to the very gate of Austerlitz. As the Grank Duke Con- 
stantine took flight from the lost field, a mameluke pursued 
him so hotly that the Grand Duke had to turn to beat him off. 
Only when a shot from Constantine had felled the horse of 
his pursuer could he make good his escape. 

In the front ranks of the retreating soldiers, two men, one 
wearing a white feather, the other a white uniform, spurred 
their horses over a ditch. They were the defeated Emperors. 
The Czar, who a few hours before was rosy with youth and 
confidence, now was pale, hollow cheeked and sunken eyed; 
but Francis, who had been beaten so often by Napoleon, better 
concealed his agony. 

The fatal blow had been delivered and had left an ugly gap 
three miles wide between the right and the left wings of the 
Allies. The army of the two Emperors was hopelessly cut in 
two and the right wing routed. 

Napoleon, seated on "Marengo," beside a little white chapel 
that still looks out upon the battle ground from a fir crowned 
height, was viewing the havoc he had wrought when, dripping 
with blood, General Rapp dashed up with a Russian prince 
as his prisoner, and his escort bearing aloft many captured 
flags. The mameluke, baffled of his grand ducal prey, came at 
the same time to explain his failure to catch Constantine and 
bring his head to the Emperor. A wounded chasseur bearing 
a Russian standard also presented himself and proudly stood 
at attention for a moment before falling dead at Napoleon's 
feet. "When the Emperor ordered Gerard to paint the scene 
for the walls of Versailles, he commanded the artist to include 
the chasseur and the mameluke as well as Rapp in his famous 
picture of that moment of triumph. 

Meanwhile Soult had whirled to the aid of Davout, who was 
holding back the Allies in their struggle to get around the 
French right and Vandamme had come in behind them. The 
roar of the artillery now shook the hills and great wreaths of 



202 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

smoke curled about them. The streets of the little villages 
which had been taken and retaken in the desperate fighting 
were choked with the dead and wounded, whose bodies had 
become a barricade against the advance of the allies. 

Turning to flee from Davout and Soult in front of them, the 
Russians and Austrians found Vandamme in their rear with 
the guns of Pratzen blazing at them on one side and ponds and 
marshes hemming them in on the other. They were caught in 
a cage and could only hurl themselves against its iron bars. 
Batteries were abandoned in a wild flight. Some Russians did 
succeed in cutting their way through to Austerlitz, and many 
thousands fled in the opposite direction across the frozen ponds. 
These tried to drag their artillery after them, but the ice gave 
way under the weight, and, to save themselves, they had to 
leave everything behind. 

"Fire upon those masses," Napoleon commanded as he saw 
the Russians making good their escape over the glare of the 
pond ; "they must be drowned. Fire upon the ice ! " But the 
balls from the artillery on the side of Pratzen rolled harmlessly 
upon the frozen surface until some light howitzers were ele- 
vated and opened an almost perpendicular fire. The ice 
cracked under this assault and perhaps 2000 of the Russians 
disappeared beneath it. 

As they went down, the sinking Russians ceased to be ene- 
mies in arms and became friends in need. With the quick re- 
action from savagery to humanity, characteristic of warfare, 
the French turned rescuers, Marbot winning special praise 
from Napoleon by swimming out to a floe on which a Russian 
officer was floating. 

Night fell like a drop curtain on the theatre of the battle. 
When Napoleon made his way among the dead on his usual 
visit to the wounded in the wretched hospitals, a gentle snow 
was covering with its mantle the uncounted slain on the field 
of Austerlitz. The French had lost probably 10,000 killed 
and wounded and the Allies 25,000. La Jeune, an aide-de- 
camp, while crossing the field five days after the battle, came 
upon fourteen Russians, who, wounded and left on the ground 



THE SUN OF AUSTERLITZ 203 

where they fell, had dragged themselves together to keep warm, 
and two were still alive. 

The Grand Army bivouacked in the camp from which they 
had driven the Allies, and Napoleon congratulated his troops 
in a proclamation. "Soldiers, I am satisfied with you," was 
praise enough for them, coming as it did from their Emperor, 
who promised to lead them back to France where ' ' it will suf- 
fice you to say 'I was at Austerlitz' for the people to answer 
' There stands a brave man ! ' " But many marches and battles 
lay between them and their homes, and thousands among that 
jubilant host were yet to find graves in alien earth. 

By an imperial decree, the Emperor adopted all the children 
of the men killed at Austerlitz, and conferred upon them the 
proud privilege of coupling with their own the name of Na- 
poleon, which, ten years before, he himself had detested as 
too foreign-sounding in the ears of the French ! He also gave 
a pledge to educate the orphaned at his expense ; after that 
"the boys shall be placed in situations and the girls married 
by us." 

The vanquished Emperors, with the fragments of their army, 
were wandering off in the direction of Hungary, but the Aus- 
trian monarch had left behind an envoy to sue for peace. This 
was the same Prince Lichtenstein whom General Melas had 
appointed his commissioner to Napoleon after the Battle of 
Marengo. Through the night the Prince searched for the 
victor of Austerlitz, whom he found only at dawn in a mis- 
erable roadside tavern. There he arranged a meeting of the 
two Emperors beside an old windmill, whither the Moravian 
farmers, in their big boots and big caps, still take grain to 
be ground. 

By that windmill Napoleon looked upon an hereditary Em- 
peror for the first time. ' ' I receive you, ' ' he said to Francis, 
as he pointed to his bivouac, "in the only palace which you 
have permitted me to occupy the past two months." And 
Francis happily replied : ' ' You have made such good use of 
it that I don't think you have any cause to complain." 

In the negotiations which eventuated in the Treaty of Press- 



204 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

burg, the Emperor Francis agreed to the conqueror's de- 
mands. Austria ceded to him Venice, Venetia, and the Tren- 
tino, thus giving up her last foothold in Italy. She also 
parted with Dalmatia, the opposite coast of the Adriatic, a 
cession which gave Napoleon many coveted harbours to shut 
against British commerce. 

The Peace of Pressburg not only cost Francis rich dominions, 
but it also cost him the respect of his Allies. They had pledged 
themselves to stand or fall together and not to treat separately 
with the foe. Francis, however, finding himself without an 
army, and cut off from his capital, had broken his promise to 
Russia and England. 

Although his first battle had disappointed his confident ex- 
pectation of reaping a harvest of martial glory, the young Czar 
refused to follow the Austrian Emperor into the conqueror's 
camp by the windmill. Without even a servant to attend him, 
Alexander ran away to live to fight another day. 

Austria having no reason to enshrine Austerlitz, and the 
place being remote from the main roads of foreign travellers, 
the battle ground is little visited. The castle, which belongs 
to a Moravian family of counts, is more a beautiful villa than a 
castle, its walls rising in a pretty park in the very centre of 
the tidy village. The memory of Napoleon eclipses that of 
all other guests of the castle, including the two Emperors 
whom he drove forth from its hospitality into a December 
night. And "Napoleon's room," "Napoleon's bed," "Na- 
poleon's chair," and "Napoleon's table" are the proudest ex- 
hibits offered to the curious pilgrim. 

While the battle tide flowed to the very walls of Austerlitz 
on the east, the western boundary of the scene of combat is 
fully eight miles away on the road to Brunn. Not far from 
the true centre, rises the green slopes of Pratzen, crowned by 
the only monument that marks the field of strife, a huge grey- 
stone memorial erected on the centenary of the fight. 

From those Pratzen heights the battle ground of the three 
Emperors rolls away in every direction, crossed here and there 
by the brooks that one day ran with the blood of many na- 
tions, and dotted over with the little stone villages that bore 



THE SUN OF AUSTERLITZ 205 

the brunt of the onslaught. The pond where the fleeing Rus- 
sians were drowned, however, is no more to be seen, its bed 
having been drained and converted into tillage. For until the 
gathering clouds of another war burst upon the Austro-Russian 
frontier in 1914, thrift was written across the entire face of 
that countryside which smiled in peace above the graves of the 
thousands who had fallen in battle where the waving grain 
blossomed in their dust. 



CHAPTEE XXV 
THE MATCHMAKER 

THE conquest of Austria completed and the spoils of vic- 
tory secured, Napoleon proceeded to Munich, where 
Josephine awaited him. Having vanquished at Aus- 
terlitz the ancient Holy Roman Empire, he felt entitled now 
to demand royal alliances for the new empire, and at Munich 
he began his imperial matchmaking with the sovereign of 
Bavaria. Arranging the details of the match with the speed 
of a military manoeuvre, he marched the couple to the altar 
at double quick. 

Eugene Beauharnais, now a prince and the viceroy of Italy, 
was to be the happy groom on that occasion, and his happiness 
was announced to him by Napoleon in the terms of a battle 
command. Eugene obediently flew over the Alps from his 
vice regal post at Milan, while his stepfather impatiently 
waited to see the marriage celebrated before returning to Paris. 
It chanced that the bride, the Princess Augusta was already 
betrothed to the heir of the reigning house of Baden ; but that 
circumstance did not balk Napoleon. He promised to pro- 
vide another bride for the Baden heir, and he gave him 
Stephanie Beauharnais, a distant cousin-in-law of Josephine. 

While he was arranging marriages from the highest tbrone 
on earth, with the hands of nearly all the princes and princesses 
in Europe at his command, Napoleon increasingly regretted 
the matches made by his family in humbler days. With a 
little foresight and patient waiting, the Bonapartes might all 
have made royal marriages that would have bound him to 
every reigning house in Europe. The latest to wed was his 
youngest brother, Jerome, and on his unauthorised alliance, 
the imperial displeasure fell in full force. 

Jerome had been placed in the navy, and after tedious 

206 



THE MATCHMAKER 207 

cruising in the tropic waters of the West Indies and rising to 
a lieutenancy, the young man landed at Norfolk, Va., in the 
summer of 1803. At Baltimore, he met the eighteen-year-old 
daughter of William Paterson, an Irish immigrant who had 
won his way from poverty to the rank of the richest merchants 
in America. While it was said of Elizabeth, or Betsy, now 
that we have been properly introduced to her, that "she 
charms by her eyes and slays by her tongue," her deadlier 
weapon spared Jerome at that first meeting and left him 
wholly charmed. In one swift month more the wooer an- 
nounced his engagement, and in a few days took out a marriage 
license. 

The French consul general warned the Patersons that by 
the law of France the marriage of a man under twenty -five was 
not legal unless with the consent of a parent or a guardian. 
Nevertheless, Jerome and Betsy were married by John Carroll, 
Roman Catholic Bishop of Baltimore on Christmas eve. 

Although President Jefferson received the bride and groom 
at the White House, he expressed the fear, in a despatch to his 
minister at Paris, that Napoleon might take it into his head 
to call the President of the United States to account for per- 
mitting the wedding to take place. Jefferson thoughtfully 
prepared Livingston, in the event of a Napoleonic outburst, to 
give assurance that not only was the President powerless under 
American law, but also that Jerome's father-in-law was "the 
wealthiest man in Maryland, perhaps in the United States, 
except Mr. Carroll' '—Charles Carroll of Carrollton. 

As fast as sails could take him, Betsy 's brother Robert sped 
to Paris with a letter from James Madison, secretary of state, 
commending him to the good offices of Robert R. Livingston, 
the American minister in France. For the bride had two in- 
fluential uncles at Washington, Robert Smith, secretary of the 
navy, and Samuel Smith, who had just been elected to the 
senate and was now sitting in the special session called to ratify 
the purchase of Louisiana from Napoleon. 

Robert Paterson could find no one in Paris who dared inter- 
cede for him. Minister Livingston was too good a diplomat 
to rush into a family row, and Napoleon said that such a mar- 



208 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

riage as Jerome's was "no more real than if it had been be- 
tween two lovers who marry in a garden on the altar of love 
in the presence of the moon and stars." In strict accordance 
with his favourite strategy, he cut off Jerome's supplies, leav- 
ing him dependent on his wife's family, while he com- 
manded that the bridegroom should leave "in America the 
young person in question," and "come hither to associate him- 
self to my fortunes." 

The obedient senate of France decreed that no civil officer 
should record "the pretended marriage" of Jerome, while 
the new Emperor forbade any French vessel to bring his Amer- 
ican sister-in-law across the water, and forbade any French 
port to permit her to enter the Empire. "She shall not set 
foot on the soil of France," he declared. 

Jerome and Betsy thus were presented with a problem in 
blockade running. How was he to steal through his brother's 
tightly drawn lines and take Betsy into France? Many were 
their adventures even before they had succeeded in clearing 
the American coast. Finally her father fitted out for the 
couple one of his own ships, the Erin, and they sailed under 
the American flag. 

With the French ports all closed to it, the Erin put in at 
Lisbon, where the French consul came aboard and inquired of 
the bride, "What can I do for Miss Paterson?" The "miss" 
spiritedly replied : ' ' Tell your master that Mme. Bonaparte 
is ambitious, and demands her rights as a member of the im- 
perial family!" 

Jerome was confident that he needed only to arrange to have 
Napoleon expose himself to Betsy's beauty and wit to insure 
her conquest of the Emperor. Filled no doubt with high 
hopes of bringing the two together, he left his wife in Lisbon 
harbour to go to his brother. 

The groom, however, found admission to the imperial pres- 
ence barred until he surrendered without conditions. His 
approaching obligations as a father constituted no valid argu- 
ment with the Emperor. Apparently they were borne lightly 
enough by Jerome himself, who, after eleven days, submitted 
himself absolutely to his brother. 



THE MATCHMAKER 209 

"So, sir," the Emperor said to the youth of the white 
feather, "you shamefully abandoned your post! It will re- 
quire many splendid actions to wipe out that stain. As to 
your love affair with your little girl, I do not regard it. ' ' As 
Napoleon bowed the penitent out, he remarked to his suite: 
"He needs a little more weight in his head, but I hope to 
make something of him." 

In three months more Jerome 's dishonour was complete when 
he stood before the world a faithless father as well as a faith- 
less husband, his deserted wife giving birth to a son in a 
London suburb and dutifully christening him Jerome Napoleon 
Bonaparte. The baby hands did not prove strong enough to 
draw Jerome away from his vanity, and Betsy, giving up 
hope, sailed home. And she accepted such solace for her 
wounded pride as a pension of $12,000 a year from Napoleon 
afforded. 

Jerome, after idling about the sea for awhile, was rewarded 
first with the rank of rear admiral and then with the title of 
prince, not to mention the payment of his always rapidly 
accumulating debts. " It is inconceivable, ' ' Napoleon growled, 
"how much this young man costs me." But he wrote to 
Joseph: "I have recognised him as a prince and I have 
given him the grand cordon of the Legion of Honour. I have 
arranged his marriage with Princess Catherine, daughter of 
the King of Wurtemberg. " 

Although a heavy liability in a financial way, the youth was 
an asset to the imperial matrimonial bureau, and Napoleon 
made haste to ask Pope Pius VII to annul the Baltimore mar- 
riage in a religious sense as it already was annulled by civil 
procedure. He assured the Pope that his brother had been 
married by a Spanish priest to "a Protestant young 
woman." 

The Holy See knew the true facts and braved the imperial 
displeasure by declining to invalidate a marriage with a Chris- 
tian of any faith that had been performed by a bishop of the 
church. But the royal house of Wiirtemberg, being Protes- 
tant, was not troubled by the refusal of Rome to sanction the 
match, and in a little more than two years after his parting 



210 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

from Betsy, Jerome became the husband of the Princess 
Catherine. 

Some time after the costly youth had been elevated to the 
throne of Westphalia and Napoleon had unloaded him upon 
the poor taxpayers of his new realm, Jerome grew generous 
toward Betsy with the money of his subjects. He offered her 
$40,000 a year in place of the $12,000 she was receiving from 
Napoleon if she would bring their boy and live in Westpha- 
lia. 

But Betsy was not a woman to be twice fooled by the same 
person and she replied to Jerome, that ' ' the kingdom of West- 
phalia is not large enough for two queens" and furthermore 
that she preferred her present position of "being sheltered 
under the wing of an eagle to being suspended from the bill 
of a goose." When the eagle heard of that witty retort, he 
enjoyed it so much that he instructed the French minister at 
Washington to ask Betsy what he could do for her. She an- 
swered, ' ' Make me a duchess ; ' ' but it continued to be her lot 
to dwell on a level of equality "with people who after I had 
married a prince became my inferiors." 

When the kingdom of Westphalia was no more and Jerome's 
glory had departed, he and Betsy met for the first and only 
time after their parting in the harbour of Lisbon. He was 
now a bankrupt, and she had divorced him to protect her 
property. They passed without a word of greeting as each was 
strolling in the picture gallery of the Pitti Palace at Florence, 
Jerome merely jerking his thumb toward Betsy and remarking 
to Catherine, ' ' That is my American wife. ' ' 

Both Jerome and Catherine often saw young Jerome Na- 
poleon, but his father ignored him in his will. Emperor 
Napoleon III offered to make him a duke, but with the vanity 
of his race, this American Bonaparte refused to relinquish his 
pretensions to a higher dignity, that of a prince of the Empire 
and a legitimate heir to the throne. 

Although his mother never foreswore her native Presby- 
terianism, she reared Jerome a Catholic, because that was to 
her "the religion of princes and kings." She entered him at 
Harvard, where he graduated, and greatly to his mother's 



THE MATCHMAKER 211 

grief, he so far forgot his princely rank as to make an Ameri- 
can marriage. 

Two sons were born to this second Jerome. The younger, 
Charles Joseph Bonaparte, became attorney general in Presi- 
dent Roosevelt's cabinet, while the elder was the late Col. 
Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, a graduate of West Point, who 
married Caroline Le Roy, daughter of Samuel Appleton of 
Boston, and granddaughter of Daniel Webster. Their son, 
Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte of Washington, is the great- 
grandson of King Jerome and great-grandnephew of Napoleon. 
If his great-grandmother's marriage had been recognised, this 
young man in Washington would be the head of the house of 
Bonaparte and first in line for the vanished throne of Na- 
poleon, instead of King Jerome's other great-grandson, Victor 
of Brussels. 

Betsy ever remained faithful to the Empire that banned her. 
Long after it had fallen, she continued to wander about Eu- 
rope where she could humour her conceit by mingling with 
titled people. To her hard-headed father's protest against her 
forsaking her place as the head of his household, she replied : 
"It was impossible to bend my tastes and ambitions to the 
obscure destiny of a Baltimore housekeeper, and it was absurd 
to attempt it after I had married the brother of an Emperor." 
When at length she did return to America it was to take up 
the management of her estate in her native city. 

After the Second Empire had risen from the ruins of the 
First at Waterloo and fallen at Sedan, and she was four score 
and ten, Mme. Bonaparte still did her own bargaining and col- 
lecting as she went through the streets of Baltimore, an old 
carpet bag in her hand. Although reputed to be more than a 
millionaire, she passed the last eighteen years of her life in 
a boarding house, where in her many trunks she cherished her 
fondest treasures — the purple satin coat Jerome wore at their 
wedding, a gown given to her by the Princess Pauline, an- 
other from Mme. Mere and all the other faded finery of the 
days of her imperial dreams. 

Is not the gravestone of Betsy Paterson, in Greenmount 
Cemetery, near the Union railway station of Baltimore, a 



212 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

marker in the path of Napoleon to his downfall? Perhaps it 
was in dissolving her marriage that the Emperor took the first 
fateful step toward his own divorce. At least it lost him a 
sister, whose loyalty to his throne would have been an example 
to his own sisters, whose thrift and ambition would have been 
useful to the prodigal and silly Jerome, and whose beauty of 
person and purity of life would have done credit to the court 
of the Empire. 



CHAPTEE XXVI 

THE KINGMAKER 

WHEN, on the first anniversary of his coronation, Na- 
poleon gained the great battle with his two rival 
Emperors at Austerlitz, he stood forth the chief 
magistrate of Christendom. He lost no time in assuming the 
imperial prerogative to crown his vassal princes. 

There were then only eight kings in Europe, the Kings of 
England, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Sar- 
dinia, and Naples. Napoleon opened wide the flood gates of 
royal honours and there was a downpour of ten kingly crowns 
in half a dozen years, or more than time had conferred upon 
princely brows in as many centuries. He had already made 
himself King of Italy, and now on his way from the field of 
Austerlitz in December, 1805, he sent a messenger, who over- 
took the Elector of Bavaria while he was hunting, with a mes- 
sage addressed to "His Majesty, the King of Bavaria.'' 
Wherefore the Bavarian sovereigns are kings to this day. The 
Kings of Wurtemberg and Saxony also are indebted to Na- 
poleon for their present titles. 

The new Emperor's success as a kingmaker flattered him 
into the conceit that in the plenitude of his imperial power he 
could do more than make over hereditary dukes and electors, 
and could manufacture kings out of the raw material of the 
common earth. After he had fairly warned the domineering 
wife of the Bourbon King of Naples that if she did not cease 
playing fast and loose with France, her children would curse 
her as they wandered over Europe begging their bread, he 
drove the royal family from their capital to take refuge on the 
Island of Sicily. Thereupon, in 1806, Joseph Bonaparte was 
thrust upon the vacant throne. 

"I can no longer have relatives in obscurity," the Emperor 

213 



214 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

said. ' ' Those who will not rise with me, shall no longer be of 
my family. I am making a family of kings attached to my 
federative system. ' ' 

The Revolution had expelled the House of Orange from Hol- 
land and set up the Batavian Republic in the Netherlands. 
When Napoleon prepared to remove this republican reminder 
from the French border, he placed the crown of Holland on 
the head of Louis Bonaparte. At one time he thought of 
snatching the crown of Portugal from the brow of the Braganza 
king and conferring it on Lucien Bonaparte. Lucien, how- 
ever, rejected the stipulation that he should divorce his wife, 
and in loyalty to her, he turned his back on crowns and thrones. 

Jerome was the only obedient member of the family, but 
when he was enthroned as King of Westphalia in 1807, his 
regal magnificence and royal vices troubled his brother much, 
and he was as hopelessly incompetent as any hereditary prince 
well could be. His poor subjects had to plough deep to sup- 
port his pomp and luxury, and he drained the resources of his 
made-to-order kingdom to fill his little capital, Cassel, with 
extravagant splendour. His royal theatre alone cost his people 
$80,000 a year, and he adorned his country palace, Napoleon- 
shoe, until it took high rank among the show places of Europe. 
By a strange retribution Napoleonshoe became the prison of 
Napoleon III, after his capture by the Germans at Sedan, in 
1870, and it was there that the last of the Bonapartes took 
leave of royal palaces forever. 

By a trick of nature Napoleon found his only real brothers 
among his sisters. Although, even as the effeminate emperors 
of degenerate Rome assumed the name of Caesar, the crowned 
brothers all styled themselves Napoleons — Joseph Napoleon, 
Louis Napoleon, Jerome Napoleon — Caroline and Elisa were 
better counterfeits of the Emperor than any of the male Bona- 
partes. Those two sisters were ambitious and masterful spirits, 
while in point of personal appearance they held their own in a 
remarkably handsome family. The elder, Caroline, wife of 
Murat, had fair hair and a dazzling complexion, with roses in 
her cheeks. ' ' She bore the head of Cromwell, on the shoulders 
of a pretty woman, ' ' Talleyrand said of her. 



THE KINGMAKER 215 

As the one sister who had a husband that was useful to the 
Empire, she made hard terms with her brother on every occa- 
sion. To appease the demands of the Murats, the Emperor 
was forced to a painful bit of surgery when he carved out a 
principality for them in Germany and created them the Prince 
and Princess of Berg and the Duke and Duchess of Cleves. 
Besides, Murat was made heir to the throne of Naples, 
Joseph's children being girls. 

Elisa, the other Napoleon in petticoats, was the black haired 
sister and less beautiful, although not at all uncomely. Elisa 
had a Corsican husband, Felix Bacciocchi, who was a hin- 
drance rather than an aid to her passion for place and power. 
But being a clever pupil of Machiavelli, she overcame the 
handicap of a stupid and useless mate and merited the fame of 
a Semiramis. This princess drew for Felix and herself the 
tiny principality of Piombino — now the Italian mainland port 
for the island of Elba — with only 20,000 subjects, but soon she 
won the duchy of Lucca, and ultimately became the Grand 
Duchess of Tuscany, with the noble city of Florence for her 
capital. 

The second sister in rank of birth, but the third in im- 
portance, was Pauline, who was a Jerome in frivolity of char- 
acter, but a Venus in the charms of her person. She received 
an Italian principality, with six square miles of territory 
and 3000 inhabitants, mostly beggars. But that sufficed to 
make her the Duchess of Guastalla. 

Happily there was one Bonaparte whom fame could not 
flatter, and whose head was not turned by fortune. The only 
reproach that history can bring to the memory of the ' ' Mother 
of Kings" is that she failed to transmit her virtues to her 
children. If Napoleon's imagination had been ballasted with 
the rock of her common sense, he might not have soared so 
high — but then he would not have fallen so far ; if his genius 
had been touched with her prudence, he might have ruled him- 
self and thereby become the ruler of the world. Given her 
solidity and strength of character, her other sons, their vanity 
in check, might have become men. Had her daughters in- 
herited with her beauty her womanly purity, and like her kept 



216 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

themselves unspotted from the world, they might have been 
ladies. As it chanced, alas, her children were not this Cor- 
nelia's jewels, but her sorrows. 

A typical Italian mother, than whom there is no better pat- 
tern, Letizia saw seven of her eight children ascend thrones 
only to mourn the loss of her family. "All men considered 
me," she confided to a friend, "the happiest mother in the 
world while my life was one uninterrupted sorrow and martyr- 
dom." 

The higher her children climbed the more she felt a mother's 
anxiety for the perils that encompassed them. With eight 
diadems in her family, motherhood remained her only crown. 
For in supreme good taste, the kingmaker left her in posses- 
sion of the simple title of mother. He only decreed that she 
should be addressed as "Her Imperial Highness, Mme. the 
Mother of the Emperor," and the world spoke of her as "Mme. 
Mere." 

The mother could not forget the hard, pinching days that 
befell her brood in Ajaccio and Marseilles, although every one 
of them except Lucien now had some sort of throne. "All this 
pomp may come to an end," she persisted in reasoning, "and 
then what will become of my children?" Let the sun of 
Austerlitz beam and the star of destiny shine ever so bril- 
liantly in the fair sky, her prudent maternal nature took ac- 
count of the possible coming of a rainy day. 

Napoleon looked to his brothers to give him an heir to the 
throne of France. In the lottery of birth, however, Joseph's 
two children were girls, as also were the two children of Lucien 
by his only recognised wife, Christine Boyer. Lucien had a 
son by the disinherited second wife and Jerome another by 
the disowned Betsy Paterson; but those children were barred 
from the imperial line. 

When the Empire came, only Louis and Hortense had sons 
in the recognised line. Josephine thus was consoled by the 
prospect of a grandchild of hers being adopted as the heir to 
the imperial crown, while her own son Eugene had already 
been adopted by the Emperor and nominated to succeed him 
on the throne of Italy. Napoleon Charles, the elder of Louis' 



THE KINGMAKER 217 

boys, was looked upon as the destined successor of Napoleon. 
The child was a great joy to "Uncle Bibiche," as he dared 
to nickname the Emperor, who delighted to roll on the palace 
floor and romp with the boy or hold him on the back of a 
gazelle in the imperial park. In his pride and affection, Na- 
poleon Charles used to shout at the review of the Guard in 
the courtyard, "Long live Uncle Bibiche, the soldier!" 

While the Emperor was going his conquering way across 
the northernmost plains of Prussia in the springtime of 1807, 
a messenger brought him the news of the little Prince's death 
at The Hague in his fifth year. By the death of the boy, the 
childless monarch was brought face to face with a momentous 
question, which disturbed the very foundation of his Empire 
and threatened the stability of the institutions, he had reared. 
It was the old troubling and unanswered question which had 
stung him to exclaim, "After me the deluge! My brothers 
or some successors will fight over my tomb like the followers of 
Alexander. ' ' 



CHAPTER XXVII 
CRUSHING PRUSSIA 

1806 AGE 37 

AT the opening of the ninteenth century, Germany still 
remained a prey to the tribal system of the Middle 
Ages. There were nearly if not quite as many na- 
tions in the few hundred miles between the Rhine and the 
Niemen as there are independent sovereignties on the entire 
face of the earth to-day. A traveller may circumnavigate the 
globe now without crossing more frontiers or passing through 
more customhouses than barred trade and communication be- 
tween the German people only a little more than 100 years 
ago. Political progress was dead among them and patriotism 
unborn. 

Prussia was the natural leader of Germany, being by far the 
largest strictly German state. But she was yet only Prussian 
and cared little for Germany as a whole. The reigning family 
of Hohenzollerns played politics as a sordid game of grabbing 
and cheating, looking only to increasing the number of their 
subjects and swelling their revenues. They were still dripping 
with the bloody spoils of the partition of Poland when they 
turned from Russia and Austria, their partners in that horrible 
crime, to traffic with Napoleon. 

They were well satisfied to share his spoils until in his war 
with England he snatched Hanover from the British crown 
and took possession of Bremen and Cuxhaven. That step 
brought him to the frontiers of Prussia and gave him com- 
mand of her two gateways to the Atlantic. 

Divided counsels now arose among the Prussians. The weak 
and irresolute King Frederick William III found himself 
pulled and hauled between French and anti-French factions, 

218 



CRUSHING PRUSSIA 219 

the latter having an ardent and influential champion in Queen 
Louise, whose sweetness and beauty have been immortalised 
by artists. 

When the young and enthusiastic Czar hastened to Berlin 
to urge the King to join in the coalition against France 
in 1805, he found an enthusiastic ally in the Queen. The 
Czar, the King and Queen in a melodramatic scene by lantern 
light, vowed over the tomb of Frederick the Great never to 
rest until Napoleon was driven back beyond the Rhine. 

In less than a month the Battle of Austerlitz was fought, the 
Czar put to flight and the Emperor of Austria brought to his 
knees. It was now Napoleon's turn to dictate terms. In- 
stead of whirling his triumphant army toward Prussia, how- 
ever, he chose to humour her, and at the same time embroil her 
with England by making her a gift of Hanover, which he had 
only just taken from her ally, the English King. He was 
quickly rewarded for his Greek gift when he saw Prussia, 
instead of making war on him, at war with England, whose 
navy swooped down upon her merchant flag and swept it from 
the seas. 

The anti-French faction in Prussia grew more bitter than 
ever at the sight of Frederick William entangled in that Han- 
over deal. But Prussian jealousy was aroused to the highest 
pitch when, in the summer of 1806, a league of nearly twenty 
of the southern German states, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and 
Baden chief among them, sought shelter under Napoleon's 
powerful protection and acclaimed him the overlord of a third 
of Germany. As the war party rallied around Queen Louise, 
the timid, halting King of Prussia was swept along on the 
current, and prudence fled the court of Berlin. What if 
the Grand Army, like a crouching lion ready to spring, was 
resting on its laurels by the Prussian border ! What if it was 
commanded by the matchless conqueror of the armies of Aus- 
tria and Russia! Napoleon had yet to meet the invincible 
army of Frederick the Great, officered by the heirs of Freder- 
ick's lieutenants, carpet knights who flattered themselves that 
they had inherited the martial virtues along with the castles 
of their sires. 



220 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Members of the noble guard whetted their blades on the 
stone steps of the French Embassy in Berlin and Napoleon 
grasped his sword when he heard of their defiance: "The 
insolent braggarts shall soon learn that our weapons need no 
sharpening." Although he neglected no detail in his prepa- 
rations for war he could not believe the plain signs of coming 
hostilities. As late as the middle of September he said: 
"The idea that Prussia will attack me single-handed is so 
absurd that it does not deserve notice." The two powers 
were most unequally matched. Prussia had only 10,000,000 
people against five times that number under Napoleon 's sway. 

As always with Napoleon's foes, the Prussians fancied they 
could fool him. The King, although he had reopened the 
port of Bremen to British commerce and his troops already 
were on the march, congratulated himself in a letter to the 
Czar in the first week of September, 1806, that "Bonaparte 
has left me at my ease." While Napoleon was leaving Freder- 
ick William at his ease, he was loading down the beams of 
light with semaphore telegrams to his army. Possessing the 
only optical telegraphic system, he could send an order from 
Paris to the Rhine in half an hour, a distance that the post 
required four days to cover. 

At last in early October, Prussia delivered her ultimatum, 
which, when received, left Napoleon only one day to quit 
German soil. Already, however, his vanguard was across the 
Bavarian frontier and moving toward the enemy. 

The war had begun, with 120,000 Prussians and Saxons 
moving southwestward toward the communications of the 
Grand Army, while the Grand Army itself, 190,000 strong, 
moved northward from Bavaria to place itself between the 
Allies and their base. One fatal difference lay in the seeming 
paradox that the shorter legged Frenchmen covered more 
ground in a day than the longer-legged Germans. Where 
each army was marching to cut the other's communications the 
one that cut first would surely win. The tradition had come 
down to the Prussians that from twelve to fifteen miles was a 
long enough march for an army to make in a day. The French 
under Lannes, however, marched sixty-five miles in fifty 



CRUSHING PRUSSIA 221 

hours. Bernadotte marched his men seventy-five miles in 
sixty-nine hours and Lefebre 's command made forty-two miles 
in one day. 

The Allies had no idea where Napoleon was until suddenly 
they were made painfully aware of his presence behind them 
on their lines. Then their army turned as involuntarily, as 
instinctively as a dog when caught by the tail. 

An army's lines of supply have been called its muscles; 
when they are cut, the military body is paralysed. Paralysis 
seized upon the brain of the allied army when its leaders real- 
ised that Napoleon, instead of being in front of them was 
behind them. Confusion reigned in their councils and confi- 
dence forsook the conceit of the aristocratic officers. The com- 
missary was demoralised and the poor soldiers, without 
rations, were marched and countermarched in a tangle of 
contradictory plans. 

Having paralysed the head of the allied army and spread 
consternation through its ranks, Napoleon's next object was to 
fall upon the bewildered foe and annihilate him. While the 
Prussians and Saxons were hurriedly falling back in an effort 
to repair their communications, he struck one division of 
them, as much to his own surprise as to theirs, on a lofty 
plateau above Jena. 

The scholastic repose of that ancient and celebrated univer- 
sity town is guarded by two towering sentinel heights, one the 
Bismarkturn and the other the Landgrafenberg, whose top- 
most height is called the Napoleonstein. For it is there on 
that brow of the Landgrafenberg that Napoleon pitched his 
bivouac in a waning October day, and there in the dawn of 
the following day he opened the famous Battle of Jena. 

The landscape of the plateau is delightfully German, with 
its old windmills and its little poster villages, where the farm- 
ers, instead of dwelling apart on their acres, gather to make 
their homes about the kirche and the gasthof. It was around 
those tranquil little hamlets that the strife raged in greatest 
fury as Gaul and Teuton took and retook them while a hail of 
lead pelted their walls. 

Against the tiny town of Vierzehnheiligen in particular the 



222 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

battle tide surged for a full half day. Beside its modest, old 
church to-day there rises a cross in memory of the men who 
were slain in its winding lanes and dooryards, and its tavern 
walls are covered with rusty souvenirs of the field of combat. 
Although divided by stone walls into many thrifty little Ger- 
man farms, the size of the battlefield is better suited for golf 
links than for a mighty combat between two great armies. 

The larger part of that small field was white with the tents 
of the Prussians and Saxons when Napoleon climbed up the 
front of the Landgrafenberg, which rises as steep as a roof 
from the valley in which Jena drowses beside the River Saale. 
He saw the Allies across the field, hardly a mile away, where 
they were flattering themselves that they were secure against 
the approach of the enemy. They held the only high road 
from Jena, which winds about until it takes the big hill in the 
rear, while the almost perpendicular front of the hill rose like 
an impregnable breastwork for their protection. The thought 
that a great army might scale it had not entered their fears. 
Napoleon, however, had not sent an army up the walls of the 
Alps to be daunted now by the Landgrafenberg and he or- 
dered his columns to scramble after him up the wooded steeps. 

As night drew on, the lights of the allied camp blazed forth. 
Meanwhile over at the brow of the bluff, where a tree and seat 
now mark the site of Napoleon's bivouac, a single small flame 
flickered unnoticed in the outer darkness. It was the only 
light permitted in the French camp, and the Emperor sat by 
it studying his plans for the morrow. 

All night his soldiers were toiling up the stony beds of the 
dry brooks, but they extinguished their lanterns as they en- 
tered upon the plateau and joined their sleeping comrades in 
the silent encampment. It was the Emperor's habit, how- 
ever, to sleep little the night before a battle. Most command- 
ers at such times issue their orders for the next day and go to 
bed. Napoleon, on the contrary, took his rest first and planned 
his battles after refreshing himself with sleep and when he 
was in possession of the latest reports to reach his headquar- 
ters. "I lie down at eight o'clock," he wrote Josephine from 



CRUSHING PRUSSIA 223 

the Prussian campaign, "and I rise at midnight. I sometimes 
think that you are not yet abed." 

When he rose at midnight before the Battle of Jena and 
made the round of his lines, he found some heavy guns had 
been stalled in the steep track up the height. He went among 
the baffled officers and weary soldiers. As they saw the Em- 
peror, lantern in hand, taking charge of the work, they were 
inspired to renewed efforts in their struggles against the rocks 
and trees that opposed them. 

When the darkness of night had lifted from the field, a 
heavy fog remained to conceal from the unsuspecting enemy 
the movements of the French. The Allies were still fast 
asleep when, out of a thick mist, a shower of bullets began 
suddenly to rain upon their tents. Finding that the fire came 
from their rear the commanding officers were satisfied that 
the attack was being made by a mere skirmishing party which 
had contrived to climb the face of the hill. It is a fact that 
the battle had been in progress perhaps two hours before the 
seriousness of the engagement was appreciated. 

Napoleon's first object and need was to drive in the wings 
of the allied forces and gain a decent footing on the little field 
for his own constantly swelling army, which was separated 
from the enemy's lines by only 1200 yards. The precipice of 
the Landgrafenberg yawned behind him, and few commanders 
would have undertaken to open a great battle in such close 
quarters. Moreover it was noon before his reinforcements gave 
him as many men as the enemy. It was only by the swiftest 
marches that he was saved from being badly outnumbered, and 
the battle was won by the legs of the French. If they had 
travelled at the pace usual with armies, Jena would have been a 
defeat instead of a victory for Napoleon. 

While he waited for his hurrying troops to climb up on the 
plateau, he postponed the decisive stroke and the imperial 
guard burned with Gallic impatience to get into the fray. 
' ' Forward ! ' ' some guardsman in the ranks shouted at last. 
Napoleon turned in the saddle to scowl sternly at the impetu- 
ous soldier. 



224 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

"How, now!" he exclaimed. "What beardless youth is 
this who dares to offer his counsels to his Emperor ? Let him 
wait till he has commanded in thirty pitched battles before he 
ventures to give me advice!" Nevertheless he enjoyed the 
valiant spirit of the guardsman, and the rash youth and the 
Napoleonic scowl have been perpetuated at the palace of Ver- 
sailles in Horace Vernet's picture of the "Battle of Jena." 

By two o'clock there was fighting enough behind the garden 
walls of Vierzehnheiligen for the most ardent warrior. There 
the rout of the Allies began. There the kingdom of Frederick 
the Great was smitten to earth. At four, Napoleon was the 
master of the no longer disputed field, where the French ar- 
tillery, drawn at a gallop in pursuit of the fleeing mob, ground 
its way over the bones of the dead. 

It was a day of surprises for both sides. Napoleon thought 
he had beaten the army accompanied by the King until a 
courier arrived to report that Marshal Davout had come upon 
that army under the command of the Duke of Brunswick at 
Auerstadt, twelve miles from the battlefield of Jena. It was 
at Auerstadt that the greater fight was fought, the greater 
victory won by the French and with a force that was outnum- 
bered in that engagement nearly two to one. 

From both fields the Prussians were in wild flight; the 
Duke of Brunswick was mortally wounded ; Prince Hohenlohe 
was racing for safety; their armies were hopelessly smashed. 

Napoleon, having beaten the Allies on the field of battle, 
proceeded to employ the arts of statesmanship and diplomacy 
to divide them forever. He assembled and addressed in 
friendly terms the captive Saxon officers, who pledged them- 
selves not only to abandon the war against him and go home, 
but also to advise their sovereign to break the alliance with 
Prussia. 

On his march to Berlin, he entered the green gate and went 
to bed in the very rococo precincts of the great Frederick's 
much Frenchified palace of Sans Souci, which sits amid its 
terraces and fountains at Potsdam. Having overthrown the 
kingdom of Frederick in a campaign of seven days, he felt 
entitled to make himself at home in the favourite abode of the 



CRUSHING PRUSSIA 225 

hero of the Seven Years' War. Like the tourists who daily 
stream through the green gate, he visited Voltaire's room, saw 
the chair in which Frederick passed the declining days of his 
lean old age, the bed on which he died, the clock which he 
used to wind and whose hands stopped at the very minute of 
its master's death. 

The uninvited guest of Sans Souci also made a pilgrimage 
to the Garrison church in the town of Potsdam, the place of 
worship of the Hohenzollerns, which is almost as plain as a 
New England meeting house. There in a bare, dingy alcove 
behind the severely simple Lutheran pulpit, two plain marble 
sarcophagi rest on the floor. One holds the dust of Freder- 
ick's quarrelsome father, Frederick AVilliam I, while the other, 
covered with wreaths, holds the dust of the illustrious son. 

The sword and sash and hat of the mighty warrior lay upon 
his sarcophagus when Napoleon visited the tomb and he 
promptly ordered that they be sent to the museum of the 
Hotel des Invalides in Paris. "I would rather have these 
than 20,000,000 francs," was his very practical computation 
of the value of those most impressive — if unworthy — trophies 
of his victory over Prussia. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 
EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 

1807 AGE 37 

THE sorrows of the kingdom of Prussia in the humiliat- 
ing years that followed its sudden collapse under the 
blows of Napoleon are personified to the sympathies 
of posterity by the beautiful Queen Louise. 

The amazing wreck of the proud kingdom of Frederick the 
Great, and the distressing plight of the royal house of Hohen- 
zollern are not easy to imagine. That awful disaster, the 
swiftest and most complete that ever befell a great monarchy, 
is best measured by taking a journey of 700 miles along the 
path of Louise's flight from the field of the calamitous battle 
at Jena, in October, 1806, to the little stretch of sand by the 
Baltic which at last was the only refuge left her beneath the 
Prussian flag. 

First going to Berlin, whither she drove in an open cart, 
Louise was warned by the commandant of her capital that to 
escape capture she must leave the next morning. Quitting the 
palace, where in a few days Napoleon would take up his resi- 
dence and seeking safety in the fortress city of Stettin, she was 
to find no security even behind its walls. Its eighty-one-year- 
old commandant was quaking with alarm, and there the Queen 
heard that even the King, whom she had not seen since they 
parted on the eve of the overwhelming defeat at Jena, was 
ready to give up. "For God's sake," she implored him by 
messenger, ' ' no shameful peace ! ' ' Hoping to brace the will 
of her spineless husband, she hurried away to join him at 
Custrin. 

An epidemic of surrender had spread over the land. A 
paralysis had smitten all resolution throughout the country. 

226 



EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 227 

A contagion of fear had seized upon the leaders of Prussia, a 
cowardly aristocracy, who were surrendering everything at 
the sight of a Frenchman. A guard of 500 French had 
marched away from Erfurt with 10,000 prisoners; Prince 
Hohenlohe was a prisoner. Before a mere handful of Na- 
poleon's troops, 12,000 Prussians had laid down their arms at 
Prenzlau. Magdeburg, with 24,000 men, ran up the white 
flag before the invader could mount a gun in front of it. 
Berlin had only busied itself with arranging a courteous wel- 
come for the enemy. In all, five great military strongholds 
struck their colours within the fortnight after the Battle 
of Jena. 

The presence of the resolute Queen at Custrin overbalanced 
the majority in the King's council, which had been advising 
his acceptance of Napoleon's demands. Frederick William 
was persuaded to rely on the assistance of the Czar Alexander, 
for had not Alexander pledged his friendship over the tomb 
of Frederick the Great only a year before ? Napoleon grimly 
retorted to Frederick William 's refusal of peace : ' ' You have 
taken the box and thrown the dice. The dice shall decide." 

The King and Queen must now move on to the Vistula, the 
next river barrier against the advancing hosts of the con- 
queror, for soon Custrin, with its 13,000 troops and ninety 
guns, was to yield to a regiment of French. An army of 150,- 
000 Prussians had melted away in four weeks, and only 8000 
were left to uphold the standards of the kingdom. 

While the King and Queen were hiding in a little river 
town, where they occupied one small room in a miserable 
wooden house, Napoleon was comfortably at home in their 
great palace. Dating his orders from "The Imperial Camp 
at Berlin," he issued to a subject world his celebrated "Berlin 
Decree," forbidding all Europe to trade with England, use 
her products, correspond with her people or even send by post 
any letter written in English. 

It was not long until Frederick William and Louise in their 
never ending flight from the advancing French, had to put the 
Vistula behind them. Crossing into East Prussia, they made 
their toilsome way in the mud to Osterode, more than three 



228 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

hundred miles from Berlin and nearly five hundred from Jena. 
The farther they went the greater grew Napoleon's demands. 

The war at the outset had filled him with genuine indigna- 
tion. However much or little he may have deserved it, he 
had not desired it. His rage overflowed all bounds when the 
King declined to make peace with him at Berlin and when he 
saw the Prussian court inviting "the Tartar barbarians," as 
he called the Russians, to take part in an affair between civil- 
ised nations of the west. Dropping the comparatively modest 
demands he originally made, he now insisted on the Hohen- 
zollern monarchy giving up everything from the Vistula to 
the Elbe, a territory 300 miles wide from east to west and 
including Berlin herself. 

Most of the King's advisers, distrusting the good faith of 
Russia, urged him to agree even to that heavy sacrifice. But 
once more Louise's influence outweighed their counsels. "The 
Queen has never once acted contrary to her instinct for hero- 
ism and tenacity," the Swedish ambassador accompanying the 
fugitive court has testified; "every one has followed her lead 
with enthusiasm." 

The ambassador correctly named the quality which governed 
Louise in that dark crisis. It was her woman's instinct. 
For that amiable Princess was not a politician, skilled in po- 
litical intrigue, as Napoleon was portraying her in his ungal- 
lant bulletins. Nor was hers a martial nature with the spirit 
of an Amazon. She was only a simple, loyal woman, born 
and brought up in the provinces, whose gentle bosom was agi- 
tated with the emotions of German patriotism, a thing un- 
known to the Prussian royalty and aristocracy as a whole. 

Another powerful instinct animated Louise, the maternal 
instinct. For the Queen was a good mother, who, although 
only thirty, had left behind in her flight the new-made grave 
of her eighth child. To her the kingdom was not a mere 
political institution, but a heritage to be preserved and trans- 
mitted to her children, with whom she was reunited at last 
when she took up her residence in the ancient castle at Konigs- 
berg. 

The royal family now had been hunted beyond the con- 



EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 229 

fines of Germany, as its boundaries were then defined. For at 
Konigsberg they were in that Old Prussia or Prussia proper 
which originally was outside the German world, although it 
was destined to give its name to the dominant state in the 
German Empire of a later day. 

The Queen found the castle, whose tower has risen these 
hundreds of years above the River Pregel as it flows through 
the city of Konigsberg, a big, bare barn of a place. Only by 
borrowing beds and chairs and tables from the wealthy mer- 
chants of the town was it made habitable. 

At last, however, Louise had her children around her, and 
that was sufficient to make the cheerless castle a home. Her 
oldest boy was eleven, and he was to grow up to be King 
Frederick "William IV. The second boy, William, was nearly 
ten. It was written in the book of fate that, on the death of 
the elder brother, he too would be crowned King some day in 
that very castle of Konigsberg, and be more than King — the 
first Emperor of a new German Empire which was to rise 
from the ruins that then confronted the royal family. 

Through his long life, "William never forgot the New Year's 
gift, the uniform of the Prussian Guard, which he received at 
Konigsberg. And it must have been an unforgettable disap- 
pointment that his mother could not see him on the parade 
ground. For the weeks of grief and privation had made 
Louise an easy prey to typhoid, which was raging through the 
town and the camps, and the court feared for her life. 

As a Russian army prepared to come to the relief of Prus- 
sia, Napoleon advanced to meet it. The new campaign opened 
on those luckless plains of Poland, which in 1914, became the 
theatre for the first act on the eastern front in the War of the 
Nations. The national boundaries then were very different 
from the lines afterward drawn. In the partition of the 
Polish kingdom, Prussia had taken a much larger and Russia 
a much smaller share than in the settlement made after the 
fall of Napoleon. The Russian frontier then ran only a little 
west of the city of Vilna, while the Prussian possessions in- 
cluded Warsaw and extended far to the east of that city. 

The strategic points, however, have not changed with time 



230 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

and were much the same in Napoleon's campaign as in the 
"War of the Nations. The French pressed forward unopposed 
and without pausing, from fortress to fortress, from the Oder 
to the Vistula, from Thorn and Posen to Warsaw. As he 
went, the French Emperor freed the Polish serfs and aroused 
the patriot Poles, who welcomed him as their deliverer from 
the Russian and Prussian yokes. 

It was not until the Polish winter had come that the 
slow moving Russians entered Prussian Poland and challenged 
Napoleon. Leaving Warsaw, he opened the hardest campaign 
he had seen since he emerged from an Oriental desert and the 
hardest he was again to see until the invasion of Russia in 
1812. The frozen wastes of northern Poland were hardly less 
barren of food for soldiers than the Egyptian sands. Even 
when they could get bread it was in loaves of black rye, which 
the French could neither enjoy nor digest. 

The peasantry, with nothing to spare from their scant pro- 
vision against starvation in the long winter, buried the little 
they possessed at the approach of the army, and took to the 
woods. Raiding soldiers flew at the wretched, depopulated 
villages only to have their hunger mocked by disappointment. 

A mutinous murmur rose and spread through the ranks. 
The soldiers had not seen a pay day since the war began. Not 
a few in their despair, resorted to suicide. The victorious 
troops of Austerlitz, instead of being led back to France in 
triumph and enjoying their well-won glory by their firesides, 
found themselves after a year marching farther and farther 
from home into the depths of a bleak desolation, where they 
ploughed through mud by day and were assailed by wintry 
blasts at night. 

While no commander ever excelled Napoleon in his atten- 
tion to the needs of his troops or equalled him in his ability 
to provide for them, it was, however, his maxim to "make 
war support war. ' ' But now he was in a country which could 
not support it. He drained its resources to the last drop and 
even employed 30,000 captured tents to make shirts for the 
sick. He cared nothing for tents in themselves, holding that 
they were unhealthful and that it was "much better for the 



EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 231 

soldier to bivouac in the open air, for there he can build a fire 
and sleep with warm feet." 

He had small sympathy with fault-finding soldiers in that 
terrible winter campaign because he shared their hardships 
and was thriving on them. He always felt better in the worst 
camp than in the most luxurious palace. While living on 
princely fare at Warsaw, he suffered from violent convulsions 
in the stomach which he feared were the symptoms of cancer, 
the disease that caused his father's death. But in the midst 
of rigorous campaigning, he wrote to Josephine: "I have 
never been so well. You will find me much fatter." Yet he 
was eating soldiers' rations and sleeping in foul hovels, where 
he dared not undress. Through one period of fourteen days 
in that campaign he did not take off his boots. . Marshals of 
France were glad enough some nights to lie on a manure pile 
and enjoy its warmth. 

The French had laboured up out of Poland and were now 
in winter quarters on the broad, Prussian plains, some fifty 
miles to the south of Konigsberg. On his own responsibility, 
the restless Ney did indeed threaten that city, whose gates 
were barricaded but defended by only a small force. The 
place was filled with panic, and Louise, although still low with 
fever, insisted upon being moved from the menaced town. To 
her anxious physician who was reluctant to risk the journey, 
she declared, "I would rather fall by the hand of God than 
into the hands of those men. ' ' ' 

It was in the depth of winter, with a storm sweeping in 
from the Baltic and beating against the windows of the castle, 
when the stricken but still resolute Queen, lying down on cot- 
ton bales in a carriage, resumed her long flight from Napoleon 
to the one refuge left her in all her kingdom. This was the 
little town of Memel on the Baltic, near the Russian border, 
and the last dot on the map of Prussia. 

The road followed a narrow strip of sand that forms a break- 
water between the Baltic and the Kurisches Haff, which is a 
great lagoon. That slender strand was covered with a forest 
a few years before and occupied by many fishing villages. 
But the Prussian kings in their greed had lately cut down the 



232 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

trees. Thereupon the big sand dunes, often rising to a height 
of 200 feet and more, began to shift, overwhelming 
and burying the villages, until this strange tongue of land was 
left virtually depopulated. Those dunes are on their travels 
to this day along that desolate shore, the celebrated amber 
coast of the Baltic. 

For three January days and for nearly ninety miles Louise 
was driven over that wild and dreary track in snow and sleet, 
with the waves of the Baltic often threatening to engulf her 
coach. One night she had to sleep in a wretched tumble-down 
inn, through whose broken window panes the snow blew in 
upon her bed. Her physician, who had followed her all the 
way from Berlin, looking back with horror on that experience, 
sighed, "Never did a Queen know such want." Arrived at 
Memel, where no provision had been made for her, she was 
lifted in the arms of a servant and carried into the house of 
the Danish consul. 

A Prussian corps having been pieced together out of the 
widely strewn fragments of the broken army and joining in 
the Russian operations, the Russian General Bennigsen deter- 
mined to steal around Napoleon. At the first sign of Bennig- 
sen 's activity, however, the Emperor started to creep out of 
his hibernation and throw himself upon the enemy's centre. 
Here again, the campaign was in a field which after more than 
a century was recalled to the attention of the reading world 
by the operations of the armies in the War of the Nations. 
Four times Napoleon faced the Russians and squared off to 
deal his blow, and four times they stole away in the night. 
For ten days the man hunt went on like a game of blind man's 
buff over the fields of Old Prussia, as level as the prairies of 
Illinois. 

Everywhere the hosts of Napoleon and the Czar went, 
they left a wake of misery more terrible than their own. The 
fruits of generations of toil were swept away as if by a con- 
flagration. Not a cow or a pig, a handful of grain, a potato, 
a copper coin, hardly a shred of clothing was spared and the 
peasantry abandoned to a long winter of hunger and cold, died 



EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 233 

at a rate five, six, and ten times greater than the normal mor- 
tality. 

Out of the theatre of that war of hideous memory there rises 
the stone church tower of Preuss Eylau, so named to distin- 
guish it from the Eylaus and Deutsch Eylaus of Germany 
proper. From that tower one looks upon a village of half a 
dozen streets almost as silent as the churchyard itself, where 
in their narrow cells the rude forefathers of the hamlet slept 
their untroubled sleep while the soldiers of many distant na- 
tions fought over their graves. 

It was after a chase of many days when Napoleon alighted 
in a February afternoon of 1807 by a tree on a hill across the 
now flower-studded meadows — the hill and a lone tree standing 
on it continue to bear his name. Surveying the scene from the 
hill, he saw the Russians posted in the village, and at once he 
flew at them. The first wave of that horrible Battle of Eylau 
surged against the churchyard wall at the edge of the little 
town and crimsoned its headstones. Flowing onward into the 
town, it broke over the wide stony market place and there in 
front of the dirty village tavern, the cannon of France and 
Russia, racing over the bodies of the dead, belched at one 
another with their muzzles only fifty paces apart. 

Tartar and Gaul, French and Cossack, hunted each other 
like rats from house to house and fought in hand-to-hand 
combat for the possession of the poor little town. The French 
took it at sunset, the Russians retook it in the evening dusk, 
but only to drop it in thirty minutes and retire into the black 
countryside, where they slept without a fire to warm their feet 
lest their lurking place might be disclosed. 

Napoleon, thereupon, recaptured Eylau without striking a 
flint, and selected the largest house in town as a substitute 
for the Tuileries. The place to-day is an untidy tenement, 
and feather-beds and all manner of rubbish clutter what 
was once the imperial salon. At daybreak, Russian can- 
non in hiding on the snowy fields back of the town sounded 
his reveille from their 500 brazen throats, their shells suddenly 
crashing upon Eylau and setting the villagers shrieking. He 



234 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

hastened to the church, climbed to the belfry and traced out 
through the grey dawn the enemy's lines. 

The enemy, after all, had not stolen away again under cover 
of darkness, and the real Battle of Eylau was on in full fury, 
with 75,000 men on either side. "While the Russians were try- 
ing to pound their way around the French left, Napoleon at- 
tempted to turn their own left and, getting in behind them, 
cut them off. But a fine snow blew in on icy blasts from the 
north and at times the soldiers could not see twenty feet ahead, 
while the melting snow so moistened the primings as to render 
many of their muskets useless. 

At the height of the blinding storm, Napoleon ordered in 
Marshal Augureau's corps, with instructions to seize a hill out 
of the town, where in these days a battle monument rises among 
the tall pines. Although ill with fever and tortured by rheu- 
matism, the marshal, unable to resist the sound of strife, was 
borne on a sledge to the battle line. There he was lifted to the 
back of his horse and, strapped in the saddle, he dashed for- 
ward in a furious snow squall. Suddenly the snow ceased to 
fall, and Augureau's 15,000 men found themselves eighty 
paces from a great Russian battery, which swept them with 
dense sheets of case shot. At the same time Russian infantry 
were raking them on one side and yelling Cossacks charging 
them on the other. Yet the 15,000 rushed upon the cannon 
and broke the artillery line, only to be overwhelmed at last by 
a swarm of Cossacks who galloped from their hiding place be- 
hind the hill. 

In twenty minutes the corps of Augureau was gone from 
the list of the Grand Army. It had been shot to pieces under 
the eyes of Napoleon, as he watched from the churchyard. At 
evening roll call only 3000 of the 15,000 stood to be counted. 

The Cossacks raced over their fallen foes, galloped up the 
churchyard knoll and plunged among the graves. "Save the 
Emperor!" rose the cry, and Marshal Berthier loudly called 
for the imperial horses. But the Emperor silenced him with 
a glance and, without moving a foot, simply exclaimed, "What 
audacity ! ' ' The invaders of his august presence already had 



EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 235 

exhausted themselves in their daring charge and were easily 
brushed back by the cavalry of the Guard. 

Murat's cavalry with their 12,000 sabres now flung them- 
selves at the enemy 's centre, while Davout pushed around the 
left of the Russians. The French seemed to have retrieved 
their mishaps, and at four o'clock they were apparently the 
victors. They were in the Russian rear and the battle was 
believed to be over. But as the sun was setting, the head of 
a Prussian column, which had been hurrying all day through 
the deep snow, rushed into a grove of birch trees. There it 
fell upon the vanguard of the French flanking force and drove 
it back foot by foot until the Russian rear was clear again. 
The army of the Czar had been saved by the Prussians. 

For the first time in ten years, Napoleon was obliged to ac- 
cept a drawn battle. In the trampled, blood-stained snow, 
10,000 men lay dead and 30,000 more lay wounded among the 
thousands of dead horses, a frightful sacrifice without a gain. 
"The country is strewn with the dead and wounded," Na- 
poleon wrote to Josephine, in a tone of lamentation as he sat 
in the salon of the present-day squalid tenement house of 
Eylau. 

The French survivors passed the night in robbing their own 
and the Russian dead and dying. They stole from the sur- 
geons while they were absorbed in their humane tasks. They 
rifled the pockets of the lifeless and the helpless living. They 
ripped off the gold braid and jerked off the boots from stricken 
officers. They tore open coffins and graves. Emerson says 
that half of Napoleon's soldiers at Eylau were thieves and 
burglars. At any rate, a season of privation had brutalised 
the army and left its better nature winter-killed. 

When morning came only the Cossacks remained before the 
town to guard the retreat of the Russian army to Konigsberg. 
To have balked and escaped the Great Captain was victory 
enough for the foe, and the Russians and Prussians were filled 
with rejoicing as they marched away from the bloody scene. 

The King of Prussia unhesitatingly rejected the more liberal 
terms which Napoleon now offered. Sniffing victory from 



236 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

afar, the young Czar came on from Petrograd to visit the 
King and Louise in their retreat at Memel. That town, whose 
one street faces the sea, thrilled with added pride in the pres- 
ence of an imperial personage as well as of royal guests. 

As Alexander embraced Frederick William, he declared, 
"We shall never fall singly; we fall together or not at all." 
And the two monarchs registered a vow that neither would 
make peace until Napoleon had been driven beyond the Rhine, 
which is a march of 800 miles ! 

With the coming of spring the war was renewed. Napoleon 
had built up his army to a total strength of 175,000 men, for 
he had a wide front to cover. Facing him were 120,000 Rus- 
sians and Prussians. Having rested and found food, both 
armies were in far better spirits than when they dragged them- 
selves to slaughter at Eylau. 

A French force, under Marshal Lefebre, captured the 
fortress city of Dantzic in May. In early June, the main 
bodies of the two armies came into a frightful collision at 
Heilsberg. But the decisive battle in this second campaign 
occurred on a hot day of June at Friedland, only a few miles 
across the country from Eylau and a little more than thirty 
miles from Konigsberg. The pretty village of Friedland, with 
its shady streets and well tended gardens, is one of the most 
awkward battlefields that the chances of war ever chose, 
perched as it is on a bluff and hemmed in between the River 
Alle on one side and a creek on the other. 

With his back to the 200-foot river, Bennigsen was pressing 
hard Marshal Lannes' small force when, at noon, Napoleon 
rode upon the scene and quickly saw that he could catch the 
Russians in the tight little town. He reflected that it was the 
anniversary of Marengo and a lucky day for him. Sitting 
down in a grove on a baronial estate at the edge of Friedland, 
where the present baron displays the site of Napoleon's 
kitchen and some cannon balls that fell among the trees, he 
scheduled his nicely laid plans for trapping the Russian bear. 
The baron recounts, too, the story of a gentle rebuke the Em- 
peror gave a young officer who dodged as one of the balls 
whistled over his head. "My friend," the great fatalist said 



EYLAU AND FRIEDLAND 237 

to the youth, ' ' if that ball were destined for you, it would be 
certain to find you though you were to burrow 100 feet under 
the ground." 

As the French reinforcements hurried up, Bennigsen tried 
to escape by crossing the river. But the fire had grown so hot 
in his rear that he had to turn and accept battle in earnest 
at five o'clock in the afternoon, when 60,000 soldiers of the 
Czar began to wrestle with 80,000 troops of Napoleon, with a 
village for the prize. Soon 60,000 men were fighting in a line 
only the length of three city blocks. 

Ney hurled his force through the first and second Russian 
line, only to be driven back by the Czar's imperial guard, when 
Victor pressed through the retreating ranks and smashed the 
winded Russians. For that feat Napoleon promptly rewarded 
his old Toulon comrade with a marshal's baton. 

Friedland was now in flames from French shells, but the 
Russians, with Slavic stolidity, fought on amid the burning 
buildings until darkness fell. By that time, Bennigsen had 
withdrawn to the opposite side of the Alle as much of his 
army as he could save. He left behind, however, 20,000 dead, 
wounded and captives, while other thousands flung themselves 
into the river. 

Sending a force to take Konigsberg, Napoleon followed the 
broken army of Bennigsen until he had driven it across the 
Niemen, by whose banks he sat down at Tilsit to await the sur- 
render of the Czar. 



CHAPTER XXIX 

AT TILSIT 

1807 AGE 37 

THE sword of Napoleon, having in nine months cut its 
way like a scythe from end to end of Germany, his 
allied foes hoisted the white flag in the month of June, 
1807. To signalise the submission of the Czar, the conqueror 
carefully dressed the stage at Tilsit, and a rude, far away, little 
town of 10,000 people, lying a few miles upstream from the 
bleak shores of the Baltic, thus became the scene of the most 
celebrated and dramatic meeting of monarchs since the royal 
interview on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. 

Tilsit is approached from the west over a plain of steadily 
thinning soil and population, where solemn storks and lonely 
windmills make the landscape all the more drear. Farms and 
grain fields give way to cattle ranges and hay fields, and these 
seem about to surrender at last to scrub forests and sandy 
wastes, when there rise against the grey sky the smoking fac- 
tory chimneys of the town, where once the Caesar of the west 
and the Caesar of the east divided the earth between them, 
while the King and Queen of Prussia stood by to pick up the 
crumbs. 

However crude a stage setting the Tilsit of 100 years ago 
may have been for the gilded staffs of two empires, the Tilsit 
of to-day is not an unworthy background for the historical pic- 
ture. With 40,000 population, with avenues as broad and 
leafy, as well paved and well swept as any Parisian should 
expect, with shady squares and pretty parks, in one of which 
stands a statue of Queen Louise; with trolley cars and taxi- 
cabs, the town wears a worldly air becoming its celebrity. 
The Niemen, across which the cheers of the armies of Napoleon 
and the Czar rolled in fraternal greeting, flows by in imposing 

238 



AT TILSIT 239 

breadth, rafts of logs floating now where a century ago the 
autocrat of all the Russias met and folded in his arms the son 
of the Revolution. Beyond the river, spanned by two great 
modern bridges, one of them dedicated to the memory of 
Louise, the visitor looks to where the eastern horizon, twelve 
miles away, bends to the desolate boundary of Russia, that land 
of gloom and mystery. 

The spacious three-story stone house, which was Napoleon's 
palace and the seat of imperial power for two weeks, stands 
upon one of the principal streets. Within it the business of a 
doctor, a paper hanger and a dealer in picture post cards has 
succeeded to the business of empire. But the urns above its 
cornice remain to assert its former pretensions, and its door- 
step, by which Napoleon forever holds the hand of Queen 
Louise in the familiar picture, still abuts upon the sidewalk. 

The Czar's house, where he dwelt a near-by neighbour of 
the French Emperor on the same Deutschestrasse, has given 
way to a modern building. But Louise 's house stands almost 
unchanged a few squares away in a humbler quarter of the 
town, befitting her unhappy role in the drama of Tilsit. It 
was and still is the miller's house, with a grist mill next door. 
But did not even Frederick the Great have to put up with a 
mill at the gate of Sans Souci? 

Over the door of the house of the miller of Tilsit is a bust 
of Louise, and on the outer wall a memorial tablet. In the 
front room, one flight up, is her parlour, where her first fenc- 
ing match with the conqueror of her kingdom took place. A 
marble bust of her in a corner commemorates now that most 
anxious hour in a period crowded with anxious hours. 

Although Tilsit is off the tourist path, that old white house 
by the mill is the shrine of such German patriots as visit the 
town. In this refuge of his stout-hearted great-grandmother 
from the disasters that for a time overwhelmed the Hohen- 
zollerns, Kaiser William II has sat in silent revery. 

But the house of Napoleon is not the goal of pilgrims. It 
bears no tablet, and its site is not even indicated on the map 
of the local guide book. 

With the French army encamped on the Tilsit shore of the 



240 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Niemen and the Czar 's on the opposite side, Napoleon ordered 
an imperial pavilion to be erected on a raft, and this strange 
structure was moored midstream, with the French and Rus- 
sian pennants flying above it. 

On the eleventh day after the rout at Friedland, the armies 
of France and Russia were drawn up on their respective shores, 
when, at one o'clock, the two Emperors appeared on either 
bank and entered gaily decorated barges, Frederick William 
standing forlorn in the crowd of spectators that lined the Rus- 
sian shore. Napoleon had not invited the King, whom he had 
scornfully described as "no more than an aide-de-camp" of 
the Czar, and whom he despised for his incompetency in the 
conduct of a war he had rashly precipitated. 

The Emperors having arrived at the raft, stepped upon the 
deck of the pavilion simultaneously, when Alexander, in the 
view of the legions of two empires, bestowed a fraternal kiss 
on the man whom he had ever before refused to salute as a 
brother monarch. "I hate the English as much as you do," 
he exclaimed, according to a French report, "and I will second 
you in all your actions against them. ' ' 

"In that case," Napoleon replied, "everything can be ar- 
ranged and peace is already made." 

Leaving their attendants outside, the Emperors then en- 
tered the pavilion, where the two childless monarchs sat alone 
for an hour and three quarters while they partitioned the 
world between themselves, for Asia as well as Europe seemed 
then to be a melon ripe for cutting. Happily neither pos- 
sessed anything that the other coveted, their boundaries lying 
far apart, and the Russians always being more greedy for con- 
quests in the east than in the west, Napoleon craftily diverted 
Alexander's attention and ambition from Europe. Seizing 
upon the timely news that a revolution had lately taken place 
in Turkey, he assured the Czar it was a decree of Providence 
that the Turkish Empire could no longer exist. 

As always, however, when nations sit down to feast on 
Turkey, the two Emperors could not agree which should have 
the Constantinople slice. "I could have shared the Turkish 
Empire with Russia," Napoleon said in after years, "but Con- 




The Emperor of the West ano the Emperor of the East Meeting 
on the Raft at Tilsit 




Napoleon Greeting Queen Louise of Prussia 



AT TILSIT 241 

stantinople always saved it. Russia wanted it and I would not 
grant it. Whoever holds it can govern the world." 

When the Emperors came out of the pavilion, the Czar, an 
impressionable, almost hysterical young man, had completely 
passed under the magic of Napoleon. "I never," he said, 
"had more prejudices against any one than against him, but 
they have all disappeared like a dream. Would that I had 
met him earlier ! ' ' 

While the two Emperors continued fondly to caress each 
other, Frederick William remained a silent and lugubrious 
looker-on at the festivities, which included grand military re- 
views and dinners of Parisian excellence on gold plate brought 
from the Tuileries. No menials served the feast, but officers 
of the imperial household were the waiters, swords at their 
sides and every seam gold-laced, with Grand Marshal Duroc 
standing in the attitude of a headwaiter. 

Napoleon parried every attempt of the Czar to return the 
dinners, because, it is said, he was unwilling to run the risk of 
being poisoned. There is a tale of his holding a cup of tea in 
his hand throughout a call on Alexander and never venturing 
to taste it. 

Sometimes he rained all manner of questions upon his guests. 
Once his eye surveyed the long row of buttons on the side of 
Frederick William's grey pantaloons, a garment that was only 
then coming into use. "Are you obliged to button all those 
buttons every day?" he asked the King. "Do you begin at 
the top or bottom?" Again he would turn upon the Czar 
and overwhelm him with questions he could not answer: 
"How much does the sugar duty bring you?" "What does 
your sale of pelts and furs amount to in a year?" "Do you 
make money or lose money on this or that feature of your ad- 
ministration ? " Such a catechism was likely to embarrass a 
man born to rule, and who had not been obliged, like the 
French Emperor, really to learn the trade. In other moods 
he turned monologist, and moved the listening monarchs to 
admiration and wonder by the seemingly boundless range and 
depth of his knowledge of the commerce in the many countries 
gathered in his empire. 



242 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

It was after the conference at Tilsit had been in progress 
more than a week when Louise finally was persuaded, ' ' amid a 
thousand tears," her physician tells us, to make her appear- 
ance there. "God knows what a struggle this has cost me," 
she confided to her diary. ' ' Yet this hard thing is required of 
me, and I have grown used to sacrificing myself." 

Arriving from ]\lemel at four in the afternoon, she awaited 
the painful ceremony of Napoleon's call at the miller's house. 
"If he will give me back a village or two, my errand will not 
have been in vain, ' ' she said to her court. 

One of the ladies in waiting who received Napoleon at the 
door has drawn with ill-concealed prejudice an unflattering 
portrait of him: "Excessively ugly, with a fat, swollen, sal- 
low face; very corpulent, being short and entirely without 
figure; his great eyes roll gloomily around; the expression of 
his features is severe and he looks the incarnation of fate ; only 
his mouth is well shaped and his teeth are good." The lady 
did admit that "he was extremely polite," and Louise herself 
has said that he wore the ' ' head of Caesar. ' ' 

Bravely putting on her most winsome manner, the Queen 
took the hand of her pursuer and led him to a window in the 
parlour, where they stood and talked for an hour. In the 
course of the inevitable conventionalities, which ranged from 
literature to botany, she asked him how he liked the northerly 
climate of East Prussia and he answered, "The French sol- 
dier, madame, is seasoned to all climates." Then in his most 
soothing tones he asked, ' ' How could you think of making war 
on me?" Louise happily fashioned her reply to remind him 
that Prussia had not always been unequal to France : ' ' Sire, 
we may be pardoned for having built upon the fame of Freder- 
ick the Great!" 

Approaching her real mission, the Queen said : ' ' Sire, I am 
a wife and mother, and it is by those titles I claim your inter- 
vention on behalf of Prussia. The King attaches more impor- 
tance to the province of Magdeburg than to any other on the 
left bank of the Elbe which your Imperial Majesty takes from 
him. I appeal to your generous heart ; it is from it that I ask 
and expect a happy issue. ' ' 



AT TILSIT 243 

' 'Madame, I shall certainly be very happy — but," and he 
cast an admiring glance at her, "you are wearing a superb 
dress! Where was it made?" 

"In Prussia, Sire." 

"At Breslau? At Berlin? Do they make crepe in your 
factories too ? ' ' 

"No, Sire, but," the Queen persisted in returning to the 
main subject, "Your Majesty does not say a word of the inter- 
ests that alone occupy my thoughts at the present moment, 
when I am hoping to win from you a happier existence for all 
who are dear to me. Are we to talk about fashions at such a 
time? Your Imperial Majesty's heart is too noble; it unites 
with other qualities too exalted a character to be insensible to 
my sufferings." 

While Louise was in the midst of her appeal to his sense of 
justice, to his emotions of mercy, to his conscience, and just 
as her anxious eyes were detecting some signs of relenting in 
Napoleon's countenance, her long-faced husband entered the 
room, darkening it with his cold and silent melancholy. 

' ' The King came in the nick of time, ' ' Napoleon laughingly 
assured the Czar when they next met. "If he had stayed 
away half an hour longer I fear I should have found myself 
promising the Queen anything. ' ' But under cover of his greet- 
ing to Frederick William he made his adieux to Louise — and 
escaped with Magdeburg ! 

When she came to dine with him in the evening he went out 
upon the sidewalk to welcome her and escort her into his house. 
He was equally polite at the table and most flattering in his 
attentions to his guest, the one woman in the company. After 
he had led her out to her carriage and bade her good night, 
he said to the Czar, * * The Queen is a charming woman, whose 
soul matches her face. Instead of robbing her of a crown, I 
might be tempted to lay one at her feet." While Alexander 
was hastening to congratulate the Queen on her conquest, how- 
ever, Napoleon was saying to Talleyrand, "Magdeburg is 
worth a dozen Queens of Prussia ! ' ' 

After his experience with them, Napoleon did not trust 
Frederick William and his court. They had been running 



244 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

with the hare and hunting with the hounds for ten or twelve 
years. First when he was Consul they had joined him in 
despoiling Austria, and next they made ready to jump on his 
back while he was facing Austria and Russia at Austerlitz. 
The moment he was victorious there, they sacrificed their sworn 
allies and began to barter with him again, but only to turn 
upon him once more. He had been vainly proffering them 
terms of peace throughout the campaign of 1806-07, but they 
rejected his advances and threw themselves into the arms of 
the Czar, thus bringing on a terrible winter campaign that 
took him 1000 miles from his capital. 

It was a maxim of Frederick the Great, ' ' Never maltreat an 
enemy by halves." Now that Napoleon had Prussia down he 
dared not let her up. He sternly informed the King the day 
after the interviews with Louise : " I do not mean that Prus- 
sia shall again be a power to weigh in the political balance of 
Europe." Frederick William grew red of face and Napoleon 
livid, in the course of the stormy talk that lasted three hours. 

That black day for Prussia ended with another dinner at the 
house of the French Emperor. It was a solemn feast, with 
the Queen sunk in grief, the King still flushed, Napoleon full 
of anger, and Alexander vainly trying to smooth the troubled 
waters. All alike avoided the one subject of their thoughts, 
the dismemberment of the kingdom of Frederick the Great. 
Only as the Queen was leaving did she venture to refer to the 
matter. "Sire," she said, "after the conversation we had to- 
gether yesterday, after all the kind things Your Majesty said 
to me, I left you believing I was to owe you our happiness, the 
happiness of my country and my children. To-day all my 
hopes are gone, and it is with very different feelings I take my 
departure. ' ' 

By the treaties of Tilsit, the Czar pledged himself to offer 
his mediation to England with a view to inducing her to recog- 
nise the equality of all flags at sea. His efforts for peace fail- 
ing, he promised to become the ally of Napoleon in coercing 
Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal to close their harbours against 
England and thus leave not a port for a British ship on the 
coasts of continental Europe. 






AT TILSIT 245 

With the easy sense of honour characteristic of princes, 
Alexander accepted in return a miserable little strip of Polish 
soil that Napoleon had taken from Alexander's sworn friend, 
Frederick William, whom the Czar really had seduced into con- 
tinuing a disastrous war after the fall of Berlin. He received 
also a vague but glittering permission to steal Finland from the 
Swedes and European Turkey from the Sultan — with the ex- 
ception of Constantinople ! 

Merely as ' ' a testimonial of respect ' ' for the Czar, Napoleon 
restored to Prussia half of her 10,000,000 subjects. Prussian 
Poland was formed into the Grand Duchy of Warsaw under 
the sovereignty of the King of Saxony, whose alliance Na- 
poleon had won after the Battle of Jena. The great Prussian 
fortress of Magdeburg and all the rest of the Prussian terri- 
tory west of the River Elbe was added to Jerome Bonaparte's 
new kingdom of Westphalia, or to Louis Bonaparte 's kingdom 
of Holland. Moreover, Frederick AVilliam, now a mere vassal 
of the French Empire, had to find somewhere more than 
$30,000,000 to reimburse the conqueror for the cost of the war. 
Until he found it, Berlin and all his great fortresses were to 
remain in pawn, with the French army continuing to occupy 
them. 

Louise returned to Memel, by whose lonely Baltic shore she 
was to pass many long and sorrowful months. While waiting 
there for the evacuation of Berlin and the restoration of her 
capital and her home, she and the royal family of Prussia were 
reduced to plainer fare than some of the villagers. Servants 
were dismissed and horses sold. The service of gold plate, a 
treasured heirloom of the Hohenzollerns, was melted down 
and coined into money for the bankrupt treasury of the king- 
dom. Louise even parted with her diamonds. But she kept 
her pearls, ' ' for pearls betoken tears, and I have shed so many 
of them." 

It was not until Christmas week of 1809, after an absence 
of more than three years, that Louise returned to her capital. 
But, as her pastor tells us, the sparkle in her eyes did not come 
back with her and on her cheek there were now white roses 
instead of red. 



246 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

While Prussia was yet sunk in the depths, the Queen found 
release from her too heavy sorrows. In the summer of 1810 
and in the thirty-fifth year of her life, the King closed the 
eyes "which had so faithfully lighted up his dark path." 
Seven of the nine children Louise had borne in sixteen years 
of wifehood survived her. The eldest was to reign as King 
Frederick William IV, and on his death to be succeeded by the 
second son, William I, while a daughter, as the wife of Nich- 
olas I, was to become the Czarina of Russia. 

The wasted body was laid to rest among the pines in the 
park of the palace of Charlottenburg, that now populous sub- 
urb of Berlin. Her effigy, carved by the celebrated sculptor 
Eauch out of Carrara marble as white and pure as her woman's 
soul, reclines upon her sarcophagus, after having been, like 
herself, a prey to war. For while it was on its voyage from 
Italy aboard a British merchantman, the statue was seized by 
an American privateer in the War of 1812, but only to be re- 
captured by a British frigate which carried it in safety to its 
destination. 

Though the mortal Queen slept in her grave, her dauntless 
spirit went marching on, a lamp unto the feet of her people. 
When threescore years had passed, an old man came to kneel 
in prayer by her tomb. It was on that day, July 19, 1870, 
the sixtieth anniversary of her death, that the Franco-Prussian 
War began, a conflict which history was to charge to a Bona- 
parte Empress as it had charged an earlier conflict to a Hohen- 
zollern Queen. 

The aged man in the mausoleum at Charlottenburg was 
William I, King of Prussia, and he had come on a filial pil- 
grimage to invoke the inspiration of his mother's memory as 
he was setting out upon his avenging march to Paris and to 
the realisation of Louise 's vision, a union of the Germanic na- 
tions in a German Empire. 



CHAPTER XXX 

NAPOLEON'S MARSHALS 

THE marshals who surrounded and supported the throne 
of Napoleon form a remarkable exhibition of the pro- 
ductive power of democracy. 

Although the Emperor flattered himself that he made his 
marshals out of mud, those eagles really were hatched out of 
the fertile egg of the Revolution. The Republic, not the Em- 
pire, was their opportunity. Every one of them already had 
won rank before serving under Napoleon. Three among them 
were colonels, four brigadiers, and one was a chief of staff, 
while full fifteen had risen to the high distinction of division 
commanders ere he became the fountain of honour. 

All but five of that brilliant company were sons of the peo- 
ple, and all but seven started at the bottom as common soldiers. 
Murat's father was a country tavern keeper, Ney's a cooper, 
Augureau's a mason, Lefebre's an enlisted soldier, Massena's 
a tanner and soap boiler, Oudinot's a brewer, Macdonald's a 
Scotch crofter, Suchet's a small manufacturer, Lannes' a poor 
mechanic, while Jourdan and Bessieres were sons of country 
physicians, Bernadotte, Soult, Moncey, and Brune of country 
lawyers or notaries, and Mortier and St. Cyr of little farmers. 
Berthier's father was an office holder of modest rank and only 
Davout, Marmont, Grouchy, Poniatowski, and Perignon were 
of noble origin. 

None but Davout, Marmont, and St. Cyr ever had seen the 
inside of a military school. All except Berthier, Davout, Mac- 
donald, Marmont, Grouchy, Perignon, and Poniatowski had 
started in the trade of war with the musket of a private. 

Massena was content to serve in the ranks fourteen years, 
and Bernadotte nine years without rising above a ser- 

247 



248 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

geancy. Soult, in spite of a club foot, was accepted by the 
enlisting officers and well content with a sergeant's chevron. 
Lannes ran away from a dyer to whom he had been appren- 
ticed, and went into the army, but was turned out as a person 
of insubordinate temper, while Oudinot after two years of 
soldiering preferred a life among his father's beer vats. Ney, 
on the other hand, chose to be a hussar rather than the coal 
miner his family wished him to be. For the better part of 
twenty years, Augureau was a wandering soldier of fortune, 
serving in the armies of France, Russia, Prussia, and Naples. 
Moncey alone among those future marshals hidden in the ranks 
of King Louis' army did win a captaincy, but only after twen- 
ty-three years of service, while Victor saw ten and Lefebre 
sixteen years of service without a commission. 

The Revolution came and the aristocratic froth was blown 
off at a breadth ; the pressure of caste was lifted from the army, 
and merit creamed to the top. Privates were transformed 
into colonels, and sergeants into generals in a month of cam- 
paigning. Every man quickly found his true level. 

It was a wonderful example of what democracy can do. 
If the civil life of France had been democratized as the 
army was, the Empire might never have risen. If the Revo- 
lution had gone to the people for its political leaders as well 
as for its army leaders, if the doors had been thrown open as 
freely to civil as to military talent, the Republic might have 
been saved. 

But while the republican armies under the leadership of 
men who had sprung from the lowest ranks were conquering 
the martial aristocracies of Europe, the politicians of the revo- 
lutionary epoch were all drawn from the old ruling classes. 
The Republic, triumphant abroad, perished at home under the 
feeble and selfish rule of ex-nobles, ex-clergymen, and lawyers. 
It was not the sword, but the statesmanship of Napoleon that 
France needed and invoked when she surrendered to his mas- 
tery. 

With the fall of the Republic, the democracy of the army 
was lost. When the Corsican artilleryman seized for himself 
the sceptre of empire, he rewarded and reconciled his com- 



NAPOLEON'S MARSHALS 249 

panions in arms, the one-time privates and sergeants, by plac- 
ing in their hands the batons of marshals of France. Creating 
at once fourteen active marshals and nattering four old gen- 
erals of the Revolution with the title of honourary marshals, 
he distributed in all twenty-six batons in the course of the 
Empire. 

Love of country no longer being potent to inspire devotion, 
he frankly appealed to personal selfishness as the incentive 
to service. "In ambition," he said, "is to be found the 
chief motive force of humanity, and a man puts forth his best 
powers in proportion to his hopes of advancement. ' ' But am- 
bition, once aroused, never is satisfied. The more it has, the 
more it wants. Mere batons did not long suffice the marshals, 
who clamoured for more and yet more. 

Naturally men are not content to serve a throne as cheaply 
as they will serve a people, that is to say, serve themselves. 
The generals of the French Republic were happy with $8000 
a year, while the American Republic has put armies in the field 
as large as those enrolled under the Empire of Napoleon, and 
yet never has found it necessary to pay its greatest generals 
more than $13,500 a year. 

"When the title deed to France had been made out anew in 
the name of one man and the nation became the patrimony of 
his heirs, the peasant marshals soon had to be appeased with 
hereditary titles and estates that they could transmit to their 
children. The Emperor, therefore, established an aristocracy 
with his marshals for its pillars. 

Once he had proclaimed the Empire and set up a throne, this 
step may have been a necessity, as it surely was a pleasure for 
Napoleon. He was always glad to share his fortunes with those 
around him, and now he opened wide his hands and rained 
titles and riches in a torrent. He scattered abroad in ten 
years more titular honours than ever fell from another throne 
in 100, creating 48,000 chevaliers of the Legion of Honour, 
1000 barons, 388 counts, 31 dukes, and 4 princes. 

With each patent of nobility, he made a gift enabling the 
recipient to support his title. But he prudently took care not 
to burden the French taxpayers with the upkeep of the newly 



250 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

made aristocracy. He did not venture to challenge the dor- 
mant republicanism of the country by drawing even the bare 
titles from France. On the contrary, he drew upon conquered 
lands for his ducal names, the marshals often being ennobled 
by titles that recalled to French pride victories on alien battle- 
fields. 

Just as it was his practice to quarter his army on foreigners, 
and make it cost the people of France as little as possible, he 
quartered his nobility on foreign countries. He distributed 
among his military men some $5,000,000 that he brought back 
from his Prussian campaign, and besides he bestowed upon the 
marshals and their heirs forever a fixed percentage of the 
yearly revenues of crown domains wrested from conquered 
sovereigns and of ancient fiefs in Italy, Dalmatia, Poland, and 
Germany. 

Lannes received at once $250,000 in cash and $65,000 a year ; 
Davout $60,000 in cash and nearly $40,000 a year; Berthier 
$100,000 in cash and $80,000 a year; Ney $60,000 in cash and 
$45,000 a year, and thus the donations ranged. From time 
to time they were enlarged as fresh rewards were won until 
the most fortunate drew $250,000 a year. 

"Pillage not," the Emperor abjured them. "I will give 
you more than you can take. ' ' His benefactions fell upon the 
entire army, including the privates, every rank receiving its 
share. 

It was the Emperor's boast that he made giants out of dwarfs 
among his marshals, but it is equally true that in a few cases 
he made dwarfs out of giants. His genius developed the lesser 
men but arrested the development of the larger natures. The 
former shone in his reflected glory, but the latter languished 
in his shadow. Those fitted only to obey climbed to fame on 
his shoulders, while those capable of command lost their native 
independence. 

' ' I alone know what I want done, ' ' he gave all his marshals 
to understand. "The Emperor," his chief of staff announced 
to them, "has no need of advice or of any one acting on his 
own responsibility. No one knows his thoughts ; it is our duty 
to obey." 



NAPOLEON'S MARSHALS 251 

Napoleon could add nothing to the stature of Massena, Soult, 
Davout, and Suchet, born leaders whom he led until their 
power of initiative was weakened. Not that they would have 
been really great in any circumstances; yet they might have 
been stronger but for his overwhelming strength. 

On the other hand, marshals like Murat, Ney, Berthier, Le- 
febre, Augureau, Bessieres, were perhaps only ordinary men, 
each with some extraordinary quality which Napoleon knew 
how to employ without suffering from the consequences of 
their defects and their ill-balanced characters. For he was 
not afraid of the wildest genius, but was confident that he 
could bridle and ride it. 

"I know the depth and draft of all my generals," he said. 
This one was stupid, that one mad, this one was an ass, that 
one a tiger ; this one was too slow, that one too swift ; this one 
had no nerve, that one had no prudence. But when yoked 
together and guided and goaded by the master hand, those 
strangely assorted marshals of the Empire were such a team 
as never has been matched in the annals of war. 

The Emperor rejoiced in fulfilling his promise to make "the 
fortunes of those who have worked with me to found the Em- 
pire and the fortune of their children." As the valiant sons 
of the Revolution gained the heights of imperial grandeur, 
however, the ladder by which they had climbed from obscurity 
to distinction, from democracy to aristocracy, was kicked over. 

The Emperor still stirred his soldiers with the illusory hope 
that any one of them might find a marshal's baton in his knap- 
sack. Alas, none of them did. For the batons were all gone 
and no marshal of France emerged from the ranks of the 
Grand Army. Although the Emperor continued to proclaim 
the promise of a career open to every talent, all those titles 
and estates which he had created were mortgages on posterity, 
perpetual entails, each of which forever closed a door to talent 
and merit. 

Free trade in genius was at an end. 



CHAPTER XXXI 
VICTORIES OP PEACE 

MORE blood has been spilt in the streets of Paris to 
overthrow monarchies than on any other equal space 
of earth. Yet those streets all seem as if they surely 
must lead up to a throne. London, in whose narrow, tangled 
ways confusion reigns and there is no sign of the presence of 
a king, expresses English freedom and English individualism. 

But its sister city across the Channel plainly is a made-to- 
order town and the prettily arranged stage setting of a court. 
The broad, tree-lined boulevards, with their miles and miles of 
windows and mansard roofs on a tyrannical level, with their 
arbitrary vistas of splendid palaces and churches and monu- 
ments, wear an air of regal magnificence that mocks the French 
Republic in its own capital and ridicules the republican sim- 
plicity of a president. 

Napoleon, at the height of the Empire, stamped his image 
upon the city and made it his monument. The Empire fell 
and rose only to fall again. Bourbons and Orleanists have 
come and gone. The Commune tossed in its fitful fever. The 
Republic lived and died and has been born anew. But through 
all its vicissitudes Paris has remained unchangingly imperial. 
Art is long and beauty endures. 

Although the British metropolis, with a population of 
1,100,000 in 1801, was twice the size of the French metropolis, 
Napoleon boasted that ''London is a corner of the world; 
Paris is the centre." He resolved at once to make himself 
the Caesar and his capital the Rome of the modern world. 
AVars delayed and his downfall defeated many of his plans. 
The Second Empire took up the unfinished work of the First 
and completed the transformation of the city from a dingy, 
mediaeval town. 

252 



VICTORIES OF PEACE 253 

Napoleon enlarged the palace of the Louvre, which 500 
years before had been built in the field by the Seine where 
the wolf hunters met, and he crowded it with the art of con- 
quered lands until it held the greatest collection of paintings 
and sculptures ever assembled under one roof. From the win- 
dows of the adjoining palace of the Tuileries, which 250 
years before had been erected among the tile kilns, he looked 
out on the clothes yard of Paris, where the housewives came 
to do their washing in the river. On the other side of the 
palace he found himself shut in by a lot of old convents and 
all manner of ramshackle buildings. 

He cleared the river bank and lined it with broad quays. 
He tore away the huddle of unsightly structures at his palace 
gate and laid out there what is still one of the most important 
and imposing sections of the city. Opening a magnificent 
street facing the Seine for nearly two miles, he named it for 
the Battle of Rivoli. Directing that it should have an arcaded 
sidewalk in the Italian manner, he prescribed so closely a uni- 
formity in skyline and architecture that every window and 
roof and corner of this Rue de Rivoli still must conform to 
his original design. Out of that great street, he ran two other 
now noted streets, which commemorate his battles — the Rue 
Castiglione and the Rue des Pyramids — but a third no longer 
is the Rue Napoleon ; it has become instead the street of peace, 
the celebrated Rue de la Paix. 

In the centre of this magnificent quarter, he reared on a 
pedestal of Corsican granite the noble column that adorns the 
spacious Place Vendome and encased its masonry in metal 
plates made from 1200 Austrian and Russian cannons. On 
those sheets of bronze he caused to be engraved in pictures the 
story of the campaigns of Ulm and Austerlitz, while he sur- 
mounted the lofty column with a statue of himself in his im- 
perial robes. 

When the Empire fell, the Bourbons hurled to the earth that 
effigy of the Emperor and recast its metal into a statue of 
Henry of Navarre, which now stands on the Pont Neuf over 
the Seine. King Louis Philippe, however, crowned the column 
with another statue of Napoleon, but in the familiar garb of 



254 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

the victorious General-in-chief, which in due time Napoleon III 
replaced with still another in the drapery of the Emperor. 
This, in turn, was overthrown by the communists in 1871, but 
the Third Republic gathered up the fragments, joined them 
together, and the conqueror in his imperial mantle continues to 
dominate Paris. 

Even while the Vendome column was in process of construc- 
tion, Napoleon suddenly determined to have another memorial 
of the campaign of 1805. Summoning his architect in the 
night, he ordered him to begin the work the next day. When 
the Emperor looked out in the morning, he saw 500 workmen 
digging the foundations for the now famous Arch of the Car- 
rousel, between the Tuileries and the Louvre. On the comple- 
tion of the arch he crowned it with one of the proudest of his 
trophies of conquest, the celebrated bronze horses of Venice, 
which had been prizes of war in the reigns of Nero, Trajan 
and Constantine, if not indeed of Alexander the Great. 

Another arch, the largest in the world, the Are de Triomphe 
de l'Etoile, was begun at his command. Seen afar, this beau- 
tiful arch of the star, rising from a gentle eminence in the 
present day centre of fashion, seems to be swimming in the sky 
above the trees of the Champa Elysees and as impalpable as a 
fleecy cloud. The streets approaching it are the namesakes of 
the fields or companions of Napoleon's glory. The Avenues 
du Bois Boulogne, de la Grande Armee, Jena, Wagram, Fried- 
land, and Kleber, and the Rue Tilsit, and the Rue Pressbourg, 
each brings its special tribute to the feet of the arch. Among 
the bronzes that embellish this huge and noble pile of marble, 
there is one which celebrates no victory and yet commemorates 
the victor at his best. It is the memorial of a simple friend- 
ship of his youth and represents the death of young Muiron, 
who was a comrade at Toulon and who laid down his life for 
his friend on the bridge of Arcole. 

One more monument to war which Napoleon designed, he 
afterward changed into a church, the classic Madelene, whose 
pagan beauty betrays its builder's first purpose, when he 
planned to make it a Temple of Glory and fill it with the 
statues and tombs of his warriors. But he himself was not 




Some Portraits of the Emperor 

1, by Gosse, 2, by Vernet, 3, by Delaroche, 4, from a miniature 5 
by David 



VICTORIES OF PEACE 255 

to lie in the midst of them. On the contrary, he chose to sleep 
among the kings that crowd the homely old church at St. Denis 
on the edge of Paris. Personally reserving there a space for 
his grave, he ordered the restoration of the edifice which had 
been desecrated by the revolutionists. 

While providing burial places for himself and his marshals, 
he took thought at the same time of the mortuary needs of all 
the people of Paris outside the city and directed the opening of 
four cemeteries such as he had seen in Germany. The first and 
most renowned of these was laid out in what formerly was the 
private park of the father confessor of Louis XIV — Pere La- 
chaise. Until then cemeteries were unknown in Paris, and 
bodies were heaped in confusion beneath church floors or found 
no abiding place anywhere. 

A complete catalogue of Napoleon's contributions to the 
beauty of Paris would be large. He gave the present Chamber 
of Deputies its classic fagade, the Pantheon its noble pediment 
and the Luxembourg its now celebrated museum. 

He had none of the soldier's indifference to nor the aristo- 
crat's contempt for trade. He wished to see Paris the finan- 
cial as well as the political capital of Europe. While engaged 
in his Polish campaign, he issued orders for the construction of 
an exchange which should correspond to the splendour of his 
capital and the great volume of business he hoped to develop. 
"It must be vast," he insisted, "with walks all round it. It 
must stand by itself." Therefore, the famous Bourse, the 
richest stock exchange in the world, rises like a temple in the 
busy marts of the city. 

The Emperor dreamed of a Paris with 2,000,000, even 
4,000,000 people gathered within its boundaries, the most 
populous city in the history of the earth — "something fab- 
ulous," he said, "colossal, unexampled." A minister urged 
him not to stimulate the growth of the city because it was 
already difficult for its inhabitants to supply themselves with 
food and water. Napoleon met that objection by summarily 
abolishing the hundreds of inefficient and insanitary slaughter 
houses and promptly establishing a few great central abattoirs 
and organising a vast public market. 



256 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

At the same time he ordered that the construction of a canal 
be started the very next day for the twofold purpose of bring- 
ing to the city water and barges laden with the produce of the 
country. There was then no water for the streets or for horses, 
and the people had to buy the water for their household needs 
at one cent a pail, but he persisted in his plan until it was as 
free as air in Paris. New fountains were set up and old ones 
revived, which together yielded an abundant supply on every 
hand for the people, the horses and the streets. "In the dis- 
tricts of St. Denis and St. Martin," the watchful master of 
Europe complained after all these provisions had been made, 
"there are three fountains without water." 

He was as attentive to the streets of his capital as to his 
military lines of communication when conducting a campaign. 
There were only three or four sidewalks in all Paris until he 
ordered them laid throughout the city. He found the streets 
swarming with robbers at night and beggars by day. He sup- 
pressed robbery by introducing an efficient police force, the 
familiar gendarmerie which all the cities of Europe have imi- 
tated, and he attacked mendicancy by opening houses of 
charity and workshops. "Every beggar shall be arrested," 
he directed; "but to arrest him in order to put him in prison 
would be barbarous and absurd. He must be arrested in order 
that he may be taught to earn a livelihood by work." 

This ruler who had hungered in those streets of Paris knew 
that bullets were not the proper remedy for want. ' ' I would 
rather fight an army of 200,000 men than have to put down a 
bread riot," he said, and he expressed two simple and prac- 
tical measures in these orders : "If the cold returns, have big 
fires lighted in the churches and other public places so they 
may warm large numbers of people." "The winter will be 
severe and meat very dear. We must make work in Paris. ' ' 

While he was in Germany, nearly a thousand miles from 
Paris, he wrote to his officials that a "disease called croup," 
which was fatal to children, had risen there and was spreading 
to France. He offered a liberal money prize for the physician 
who should propose the best treatment of the ailment. 

Nor did he neglect the nation or any part of his immense 



VICTORIES OF PEACE 257 

Empire. The network of canals that carry the commerce of 
France to-day was systematised by him. It was he who or- 
dered the construction of waterways that linked all the rivers 
in the country. 

The unequalled system of highways in France was inau- 
gurated by him and toll gates were torn away. Applying his 
hammers to the Alps, he did what the Romans had not dared 
to try, tracing through blocks of granite, smooth, spacious 
roads over and under mountains which had interposed since 
time began to 

Make enemies of nations who had else 
Like kindred drops, been mingled into one. 

Wherever he found a barrier between men, whether of na- 
ture or of law, he impetuously threw himself against it in a 
fury to remove it. Capturing a city, he levelled its walls. 
Capturing a citadel, he dismantled it. The first general of 
modern times to lead a big army over the Alps, he constructed 
pleasant promenades across them by which the merest holiday 
soldier was freely challenged to invade France. 

The great Simplon road from Switzerland into Italy cost 
$25,000 a mile and as many as 30,000 workmen were employed 
upon it at one time. There is no more fitting monument of 
the constructive genius of Napoleon than the gallery of Gondo 
on the Simplon, where a tunnel nearly two hundred and fifty 
yards long pierces an enormous mass of rock that seemed to 
make the road impossible. No traveller reads without a thrill 
of admiration the inscription at the portal of the tunnel : 

Aere Italo, 1805, Nap, Imp. 

Two other Alpine roads of his reign are the Mt. Cenis and 
that over Mont Genevre, both leading from France into Italy. 
A fourth is the Grande Corniche, the noblest road in the 
world, which he built so high up on the brow of the Maritime 
Alps from Nice to Mentone that the British gunboats could 
not shell an army marching by it into Italy. From Metz to 
Mayence on the Rhine he threw a highway across trackless 
marshes and through vast forests. 



258 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The great ports of Antwerp, Cherbourg, and Boulogne are 
more indebted to his reign than to any other for their present 
importance. The facade of the Milan cathedral had waited 
400 years to be completed, but he ordered it finished in short 
order. At the same time, he decreed the construction of the 
pretty marble arch which marks in that city the completion 
of the Simplon road. Canova's bronze statue of the Em- 
peror's nude figure, which was designed for the arch, stands 
instead in the courtyard of the Brera Gallery at Milan. 

On a brief visit to Venice, Napoleon ordered the demolition 
of a group of old monasteries and laid out the Public Garden ; 
transferred the cathedral honours from St. Peter's to the more 
famous church of St. Mark's, and authorised the expenditure 
of $1,000,000 in improving the harbour and the canals. 

He was never to see Rome, but in anticipation of a visit to 
the Eternal City after his return from Russia, he planned its 
restoration and the construction of roads and canals for its 
benefit. To the same end he ordered from the sculptor, Thor- 
waldsen, the celebrated relief, the Triumph of Alexander, as an 
adornment for the walls of the Quirinal palace, but reverses 
overtaking him, the sculpture passed into other hands. It 
now forms the frieze of the Marble Hall in the Carlotta Villa 
on Lake Como, while only a plaster copy of it has been set up 
in the palace of the King of Italy on the Quirinal. 

For the most part Napoleon wrought in stone and was in 
reaction from the idealism that preceded the Empire and ran 
riot. Still he remained obedient to many of the solid, tangible 
purposes of the Revolution which sent him forth. He up- 
rooted ancient injustice all along his way and planted liberal 
institutions throughout Europe. Even to faraway Poland, he 
carried modern laws, freeing the serfs and the land, while 
Prussia emulated the example of her conqueror and feudalism 
disappeared from Germany in a year. "Let every species of 
serfage be abolished, ' ' he commanded his brother Jerome, when 
setting him upon the throne of Westphalia. ' ' The benefits of 
the Code Napoleon, the publicity of court proceedings, the es- 
tablishment of juries should form so many distinctive char- 
acteristics of your monarchy." 




Some Napoleonic Autographs 



VICTORIES OF PEACE 259 

He did more for the emancipation of the Jews than all other 
rulers together in three centuries. He convoked their leaders 
in the famous French Sanhedrim of 1807 and his Madrid 
decree still is their charter of rights in the lands that formed 
his Empire. "All men are brothers before God," he de- 
clared to a deputation composed of a Catholic priest, a Protes- 
tant minister, and a Jewish rabbi, and he gave that brother- 
hood the force of law nearly everywhere in Europe. How far 
he stood in advance of even the more progressive nations may 
be measured by the fact that the earl marshal of England, 
the Duke of Norfolk, still was debarred from a seat in 
the House of Lords because he was a Catholic, while George III 
dismissed a British cabinet in 1807 because it favoured the 
emancipation of the Catholics, a measure of justice that was 
refused until 1829. And it was not until 1858 that England 
emancipated the Jews. 

Notwithstanding its comparative liberalism in many things, 
the Empire of Napoleon was not of the higher realm of the 
spirit, but a splendid materialism. While he established the 
University of France and organized schools for the few, his 
energies were wholly directed toward fitting men for his serv- 
ice. He did nothing for popular education. The Empire 
found 96 per cent, of the people illiterate — think of it, only 
four Frenchmen in 100 could read or write ! — and it is 
doubtful if there were more than 25,000 children in the public 
primary schools of France at any time while Napoleon was on 
the throne. 

The finer arts languished in the deep shade of this massive 
figure. Notwithstanding he offered liberal yearly prizes, no 
great poem or song, no great opera or play found its inspira- 
tion in him. Beethoven dedicated his symphony, "Eroica," 
to the First Consul. When his republican hero put on the 
crown, however, the composer angrily tore off the dedication, 
trampled it under his feet and dedicated the immortal sym- 
phony anew to the ' ' memory " of a great man ! 

Although he ordered and paid for paintings by the yard — 
"eight metres, three decimetres in height and four metres in 
breadth, the price to be $2400" — he admitted that it was "ab- 



260 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

surd to order a poet to write an ode as you would order a 
dressmaker to make a muslin gown." Yet he seemed often 
tempted to arrest the poets and musicians for their ineffectual 
attempts to gild the gold of his achievements. "If things do 
not go on better at the opera, ' ' he threatened, ' ' I will put in a 
good soldier to manage it. ' ' 

In the end this masterful man, in his infinite variety, made 
himself the poet and the orator of France. The map of Eu- 
rope was the sheet whereon he wrote the greatest epic of his 
time. "However vigorous his practical faculty," says Taine, 
in his study of Napoleon, "his poetic faculty is stronger. It 
is even too vigorous for a statesman ; its grandeur is exag- 
gerated into enormity, and its enormity degenerates into mad- 
ness." 

Napoleon's proclamations to his army often rose to the clear 
heights of oratory. Emerson pronounced his battle narratives 
as good as Caesar's. A measure of his activities as a writer is 
offered by his published correspondence, filling more than 
thirty volumes and comprising nearly 30,000 documents. 

Yet very little of it did he write with his own hand. No 
pen could keep up with his thoughts. His words flew from his 
lips while the quills of his secretaries, with no system of 
stenography to aid them, raced to put on paper a few main 
points and characteristic expressions from which to frame 
letters, orders, proclamations, and speed them by couriers to 
all corners of the Empire. If they were engulfed by the tor- 
rent and floundered, he cried out as if in pain, "I cannot re- 
peat ; you make me lose the thread of my thought. ' ' 

He did not have time even to subscribe "Napoleon" to the 
documents which his secretaries laboriously wrote out and laid 
before him ; he merely jabbed them with his quill and made an 
undecipherable sign which yet sufficed to give them full force 
and effect throughout Europe. Sometimes the illegible scratch 
was intended for "Nap," but as the terrible pressure weighed 
heavier and heavier upon him he made only a fish hook for 
an "N." Thus while the power and care of the Emperor in- 
creased his autograph diminished ; as the man grew in au- 
thority his signature grew smaller and meaner. 



VICTORIES OF PEACE 261 

Just as the one letter "N" hastily scrawled sufficed to pro- 
claim his will to a docile world so his presence needed not to 
be heralded by any long title. As kings and princes entered 
the court they were announced by all their proud designations, 
but when the doors were thrown open for the sovereign of 
sovereigns the attendant pronounced only the simple, yet thrill- 
ing title, "L'Empereur!" 

He became the literature, politics, and trade of France. He 
held no councils in war and no cabinet meetings in peace. 
He let Talleyrand go — "he was always in a state of treason" — 
and acted as his own minister of foreign affairs. He abolished 
the Tribunate and his own was the one voice left in the nation. 
Strong, stubborn natures fled him, and those who remained 
sank into clerks to do the bidding of one whom Gladstone 
rated "the greatest administrator in history." 

Generally he was at work as early as seven in the morning, 
tearing through the multitudinous duties of an Empire which 
embraced half a dozen kingdoms and thirty principalities. 
Sometimes he awoke at a most unreasonable hour and called 
for his assistants, shouting, as Baron de Meneval tells us, 
"Let every one arise." 

The financier who financed that enormous Empire, clothed, 
fed, armed its tremendous armies, was Napoleon himself. Gal- 
loping back from Austerlitz, he stole into Paris in the night, 
and after an absence of 125 stirring days, sat down at his table 
as if he had only returned from a stroll. Summoning his 
ministers in council at eight in the morning, he began to 
straighten out the tangled finances of his government, re- 
organise its income and outgo and establish a new system of 
double entry accounting. 

He hated a public debt. The debt of France was $100,000,- 
000, when he began to fund it, and he swore that ' ' as long as I 
rule I shall not issue any paper." At the height of his power 
the yearly expenditures ranged from $140,000,000 to $180,- 
000,000. He made his army pay its own way with indemni- 
ties from conquered lands and subsidies from allied states. 
Warfare was cheap in a time when soldiers received only a few 
cents a day, lived off the country, and ordnance was simple 



262 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

and inexpensive. The army pay roll was hardly ever more 
than $1,000,000 a month. 

No stock speculator ever watched the ticker more closely 
than Napoleon watched the fluctuations in the price of rentes, 
or the public securities. Their par value was 100 francs,' 
but where they sold for only twelve francs the day before 
he seized the reins, they rose steadily until the victory of 
Austerlitz boosted them to seventy and the peace of Tilsit to 
ninety. Shortly afterward they touched ninety-three, which 
represented interest at the rate of about 5 per cent. 

^ The Emperor's attention to money matters was not limited to 
high finance. He watched the centimes as vigilantly as the 
francs. He corrected even the Empress' laundry bills and re- 
joiced over the saving of $7000 a year effected by his having 
systematised the expenditures for the 155 cups of coffee daily 
drunk in his palaces. He made his marshals and courtiers, 
when in attendance at court, furnish their own blankets, linen' 
towels, firewood, and candles, and gave them nothing but the 
bare beds. Not a sip of soup or wine could be obtained in any 
of the palaces without a cheek from Dtiroc, the grand marshal. 

Life at court necessarily was robbed of its joyousness by 
such a spirit of cheese paring in the palaces, the upkeep of 
which was reduced to an allowance of only $600,000 a year, 
whereas it had been as much as $5,000,000 under the Bourbons,' 
when the broth for a two-year-old princess cost $1000 a year! 
and rolls for each lady in waiting $400. Louis XVI spent 
$400,000 on a court journey to Fontainebleau, a function that 
Napoleon duplicated, in outward form at least, for $30,000. 

Yet he was prodigal with rewards. Every man in France 
knew that if he devised anything useful in science or rendered 
an important service the Emperor would handsomely repay 
him. Napoleon had insisted from the outset that the Legion 
of Honour should not be for the reward of soldiers alone. He 
contended, on the contrary, that "all sorts of merits are broth- 
ers," and that "intelligence has rights before force." Hon- 
ours fell upon exceptional men in every calling. As the cheva- 
liers of the Legion came and went through life, with their deco- 
rations on their coats, sentries presented arms and the gen- 



VICTORIES OF PEACE 263 

darme lifted his sword; their sons and daughters were edu- 
cated by the state, and when they themselves died, a squad of 
twenty-five soldiers marched beside the funeral car. 

Many broke under the heavy yoke of Napoleon. He said 
of one of his ministers that he had some merit at first, "but 
by cramming him too full I have made him stupid. ' ' Decres 
groaned, "that terrible man has subjugated us all." Another 
of his ministerial tools said, "I used to think I saw the Em- 
peror standing over me as I worked shut up in my office." 

Compassionless toward himself, this taskmaster was not with- 
out compassion toward others. He confessed at one time that 
he had already worked to death two of his ministers and would 
have killed a third had he not been so tough. "The lucky 
man," he said, "is he who hides away from me in the depth of 
some province. When I die, people will draw in their breath 
and say 'ouf !' " 

For himself there was no hiding place, no refuge from his 
morbid restlessness, no escape from the terrible energies that 
boiled up and clamoured within him, no release from the super- 
normality with which nature had visited him. Power warped 
his whole being. He lost the capacity to smile — he never 
could laugh. Care furrowed his face and left his eye cold 
and searching. ' ' That devil of a man ! ' ' the bold ruffian Van- 
damme exclaimed. "I, who fear neither God nor the devil, 
tremble like a child when I approach him. He could make me 
jump through the eye of a needle into the fire." 

From the towering summit of his own eminence, he saw 
mankind so nearly on a dead level below him that individ- 
uality was almost lost. The imagination and plans of others 
could not keep up with his own and were but a drag upon him. 
He needed only the arms and hands and legs of men to execute 
his thoughts, which gushed forth spontaneously like water from 
a geyser. 

Thus, one man absorbed France and Europe until he was 
all in all, nations and armies, commerce, industry and litera- 
ture, kings, queens, princes, ministers, and marshals, like fly- 
ing horses in a merry-go-round, revolving on his Atlantean 
shoulders. 



CHAPTER XXXII 

FORTUNE TURNS 

1806-1809 AGE 36-39 

RETURNING to Paris from Tilsit on a mid-summer 
morning in 1807, Napoleon stood on the summit of 
power and looked down upon a continent obedient to 
his will. As he walked the giddy heights, however, he saw 
distant peaks that seemed to rise above him and challenge his 
aspiring spirit to climb higher still. Yet all the roads opening 
before him, whether their finger posts invited him to Spain, 
or to Rome, to Divorce or to Moscow, inevitably ran down hill, 
since he was already in fact at the top. 

He was at peace with the world save for a little island that 
lay off in the fog of the North Atlantic like "a wart on the 
nose of Europe," as he contemptuously described it. He was 
confident he could conquer England in a bloodless campaign 
without firing another gun and without leaving his capital. 

With the flags of France and her allied nations swept from 
the ocean, and English vessels excluded from the harbours of 
the continent, the American flag had become the favourite ref- 
uge and protector of a great commerce. To prevent the infant 
republic of the west taking from them the lead in the carrying 
trade, the British ministers adopted the watchword, "No trade 
except through England." To that end they forbade neutral 
ships to enter any port of Napoleon's empire unless they first 
visited an English port, and paid a heavy tribute to the British 
treasury. Napoleon thereupon retorted with a decree which 
condemned to seizure any vessel submitting to that exaction. 

With that stroke the doom of the commerce of the seas was 
complete. The great waters all but reverted to the trackless 

264 



FORTUNE TURNS 265 

wastes they were before the voyages of Columbus, Gama, and 
Magellan, while Napoleon undertook to reopen the ancient 
overland routes to the east. 

The new world was now involved with the old in a universal 
conflict. It was estimated that only one in eight American 
vessels crossing the Atlantic escaped capture at the hands of 
France or England. 

The United States, seeking at once to protect its ships and 
retaliate on both of the belligerent powers, adopted the Em- 
bargo Act in 1807. To that end Congress forbade American 
vessels to clear for European ports, and it sought to cut off Eu- 
rope from American supplies. Nevertheless the stars and 
stripes continued to appear in European waters. Many 
American ships eluded the Embargo Act by staying away from 
home and engaged in the carrying trade between foreign 
ports. 

By a further decree, however, Napoleon condemned all ves- 
sels of the United States entering his harbours, since they had 
no right under American law to be absent from their own 
ports. Obedient to this last act, 134 American ships were 
seized in a year, and their cargoes, aggregating in value $10,- 
000,000, were confiscated. 

"When England saw the bayonets of Napoleon, like a barbed 
wire fence, enclosing the shores of the Atlantic and the Baltic, 
the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, she sought to keep the 
port of Copenhagen open to her trade by bombarding that city 
and carrying off the Danish navy. The Emperor at the same 
time was menacing a feeble nation at the other extremity of 
Europe and demanding that Lisbon, the only southern port 
where the British flag still found a welcome, should be closed. 
' ' If Portugal does not do as I wish, ' ' he stormed at the Portu- 
guese ambassador, ' ' the House of Braganza will cease to reign 
in two months. I will no longer tolerate an English ambas- 
sador in Europe, but will declare war against any power that 
receives one at its court. ' ' 

He was determined to plant his guns at every harbour mouth 
on the continent and bar England from the land as effectually 
as she was barring France from the sea. The few poor little 



266 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

ports of the Papal States did not escape his attention. Pope 
Pius VII was sternly commanded to close them to British 
trade and join the continental alliance against Great Britain. 

While Pius VII discreetly yielded to the Commander-in- 
chief of an army of 800,000 soldiers so far as to consent to the 
exclusion of British trade from his dominions, he refused to 
declare war against England and become a militant ally of 
France. Thereupon an imperial army suddenly entered 
Rome, where the Papal secretary of state and various members 
of the cardinalate were arrested and deported until only 
twenty-one cardinals remained in the city, which now lay 
beneath the sword of Napoleon. 

The little kingdom of Portugal, torn between the master of 
the land and the mistress of the sea, also failed to meet the Em- 
peror's demands in full, and he hurled upon it a French army 
of invasion, under the command of Junot. Sir Sidney Smith, 
the ubiquitous rover of the sea, who had baffled Napoleon at 
Acre, was in Lisbon harbour as the invaders approached the 
city, and he induced tin' poor mad Queen and her Prince Re- 
in 'i it to hoard one of his ships. When, therefore, Junot arrived 
at the palace he found that Smith had removed the Portuguese 
crown beyond his reach and that the royal family had flown to 
their Brazilian colony. There the fugitive Braganzas set up 
a throne for the first time in the western hemisphere and ul- 
timately founded the Empire of Brazil. 

A squalid brawl in the wretched royal family at Madrid 
now tempted Napoleon to take their throne away from them. 
Ferdinand, the Prince of the Asturias and heir to the crown 
of Spain, a narrow, dark souled young man of twenty-three, 
rebelled against his father, and both turned to the mighty 
Emperor, each appealing for his protection against the other. 
Son and father were plainly told that neither should have the 
crown, and the ignominious pair were not long in resigning 
themselves to their imperious master. Signing away their do- 
minion in two worlds, they accepted in return large pensions 
and gilded prison cells in French chateaux. 

As coolly as if he were appointing prefects to govern French 
departments, Napoleon in 1808 assigned Joseph to be King 



FORTUNE TURNS 267 

of Spain and Emperor of the Two Americas, and ordered 
Murat to mount the throne of Naples. At the same time, as 
always when incorporating a new country in his empire, he 
gave Spain the boon of a liberal constitution and sound guaran- 
tees of a government infinitely better than it ever had known. 
To his astonishment he found that the Spanish people cared 
much more for their pride than for any progress he could 
offer them. They preferred their own antiquated, oppres- 
sive and corrupt government to any modern improvements 
introduced by a foreigner. Instantly rising in a frenzy 
of indignation at the insult to their nation, they drew their 
knives and cut every French throat that lay bare to their 
revengeful hands. 

This was a wholly new experience for Napoleon. In Italy 
and Egypt and Poland he had battled only with the alien op- 
pressors of the population, to whom he presented himself as a 
liberator. In Austria and Prussia he had not fought the 
people, but only a stupid and selfish aristocracy. 

When, however, he accepted the challenge of the popular re- 
volt in Spain and undertook to crush a people, he definitely 
ceased to be the champion, and became the enemy of democracy. 
In the picture that he was contemplating, he saw himself a 
second Charlemagne uniting Europe in a new empire of the 
west. But in the ten centuries since the Carlovingian Empire 
was founded, nations had risen and the sentiment of patriotism 
had become a mighty force among men. Napoleon himself 
had no nation and had grown up a stranger to patriotism. 
By a strange stroke of poetic justice he had left his subjugated 
Corsica, had conquered its conquerors and brought the con- 
tinent under the rule of an islander. His army was a medley 
of nations and races; his camp a babel of tongues. Italians 
guarded his eagles on the dykes of the North Sea ; Poles bore 
them through the passes of the Pyrenees, and Spaniards 
patrolled the sandy bounds of his dominion by the Baltic. 

He viewed with contempt the savage fury of the undisci- 
plined rabble that had set all Spain ablaze. "Be gay," he 
commanded King Joseph, "and do not let yourself be trou- 
bled." But poor Joseph could not fairly be expected to dis- 



268 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

play much gaiety as he found himself elevated on the point of 
a bayonet and enthroned on a keg of gunpowder. Within nine 
days of his entry into his new capital, the imported King was 
in flight northward from the rebellious hordes that overran 
his kingdom. 

Had that misfortune come singly it would have been bad 
enough, but it was accompanied by a disaster that stunned the 
Emperor and left him speechless with grief and rage. A 
French army under General Dupont had been caught between 
two fires at Baylen, in Andalusia, and nearly 20,000 French- 
men had laid down their arms to the Spanish mobs that 
hemmed them in. 

The Emperor was in southern France when he was struck 
by that "blow of fate," as he called it. Through three hours 
of silent agony he held the direful news in his breast, without 
lisping a hint of it, until at last plaintive cries escaped his lips. 

For the first time an army of Napoleon had surrendered. 
For the first time his imperial eagles, bestowed on his bat- 
talions by his own hands, were captives in the hands of an 
enemy. As if promptly to point the prophecy which that 
event held, another of his armies surrendered in the following 
month to Sir Arthur Wellesley, in the first battle between a 
French force and the destined victor of Waterloo. 

The future Duke of Wellington had landed an English army 
on the Portuguese coast to reopen the harbour of Lisbon and 
drive the French from the country. Junot had marched out 
from Lisbon to repel him with an inferior force. Then for the 
first time since Yorktown, an English and a French army faced 
each other in battle, and the English won. The French capit- 
ulated and agreed to abandon their occupation of Portugal. 

While the Spaniards were placing the captured eagles of 
Napoleon among the treasures in the cathedral of Seville, the 
amazing report of their victory and the English victory in 
Portugal ran throughout Europe and awakened a new hope in 
the foes of the Empire everywhere. Austria grew bolder and 
more urgent in the war preparations which she had been mak- 
ing ever since Austerlitz. 

To eclipse the thoughts of his recent defeats and revive the 



FORTUNE TURNS 269 

memories of his victories, to convince the Hapsburgs and 
all other restless elements that the compact of Tilsit still 
united the two greatest powers of Europe, Napoleon in- 
vited his ally, the Czar, to meet him in Germany. This second 
meeting of the Emperors took place in the early autumn of 
1808 at Erfurt, where Napoleon and Alexander played Damon 
and Pythias before a retinue of four kings and a score of 
princes and a dozen dukes, who humbly waited upon their im- 
perial majesties. 

Having fortified the Franco-Russian alliance, Napoleon 
turned to face the Spanish mobs. Leaving Paris in the im- 
perial state that now marked his going to war, fresh horses, 
sent on ahead, awaited him at each nine or ten mile stage of 
the journey. Berthier sat beside him in the great lumbering 
coach, with iron tires almost as broad as an automobile's. In 
front of the Emperor's seat, which at night was converted into 
a bed on which he could lie at full length, was a door that 
could be let down and employed as a table, while behind it were 
the drawers and pigeonholes of a complete office desk. 

Duroc, grand marshal of the palace in charge of all the 
travelling arrangements, galloped on one side of the carriage. 
On the other side rode Caulaincourt, master of the horse, 
with the maps which must always be at the Emperor's call. 
The horses of a score of aides-de-camp and orderlies pranced 
about the vehicle, with four pages mounted behind and on top 
of it. 

At the rear right wheel Roustan, the mameluke, always rode, 
with a luncheon ever ready to be served. Beside the opposite 
wheel rode two mounted chasseurs carrying portfolios filled 
with papers. Equerries and grooms and the Emperor's per- 
sonal stud of eight or ten led horses followed. The escort con- 
sisted of a detachment of chasseurs of the Guard and whenever 
and wherever the Emperor set foot four of them with drawn 
sabres surrounded him in a square, nimbly jumping this way 
and that before and behind him as he walked about. 

On a melancholy day early in November of 1808 this caval- 
cade passed into the sombre land of the Spaniards, where Na- 
poleon took command of a superb army of more than 200,000 



270 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

troops to confront 170,000 Spaniards and British. For Eng- 
land had now made common cause with the revolting Spanish. 

As the Emperor sped toward Madrid, he drove a wedge be- 
tween the wings of the enemy's army. He left the wings un- 
wounded, however, and in condition to unite and flap together 
again. Meanwhile no serious resistance was offered to his ad- 
vance. The nation parted, to let the invader pass, as a sea 
parts at the prow of a ship, but only to close in when he was 
gone and leave no trace of his passage. 

Entering the Spanish capital in less than four weeks from 
the opening of the campaign, he patted the mane of one of the 
white marble lions that guard the grand stairway in the royal 
palace and exulted, "I possess you at last, the Spain I desire !" 
But all his possessions in Spain were limited to mere symbols of 
power, like those lions of the stairway. He had conquered 
roads, and castles, and palaces, but he had not subdued the 
people anywhere. 

At the fall of their city, the inhabitants of Madrid haughtily 
drew their cloaks about them and in silent disdain received 
the conqueror. In vain he proffered his unwilling subjects the 
solid advantages of modern institutions and laws. The Span- 
ish people would accept nothing from his hand. He opened 
the theatres in order to reawaken the gaiety of Madrid. The 
Spaniards would not enter them. For days hardly a woman 
appeared in the streets, and the gallant invaders sighed in vain 
even for a glimpse of a pair of black eyes behind the grilled 
gates of the houses. The Emperor heralded abroad his appear- 
ance at grand reviews, but pride overcame curiosity and the 
people refused to come out to see the most extraordinary per- 
sonage of modern times. 

Napoleon was organising at Madrid an expedition to drive 
the English out of Portugal, when 30,000 British, under Sir 
John Moore, crossed the Portuguese frontier to drive him out 
of Spain. As they moved straight toward his communications, 
the threat at once diverted him from his Lisbon campaign. 
Leaving Madrid in mid-winter, after a stay of three weeks in 
that capital, he began the pursuit of Moore. Afoot in a storm 
of hail and sleet he led his army over the Sierra de Guadar- 



FORTUNE TURNS 271 

rama, whose peaks divide old Castille from new. But in spite 
of his swift marches the English escaped him and were well 
along in their retreat to Corunna. 

Already a fresh alarm about Austria had recalled him from 
his dreams of "planting his eagles on the towers of Lisbon." 
Quickly turning to hurl himself against the walls of Vienna, 
1800 miles away, he abandoned to his marshals the war on the 
peninsula. General Savary with difficulty kept ahead of his 
master, but Duroc and Roustan lagged in the dust, while the 
Emperor, with a solitary aide-de-camp at his side, spurred on 
from relay to relay of horses in his race to Paris. 



CHAPTER XXXIII 
HIS LAST VICTORY 

1809 AGE 39-40 

AS Napoleon galloped back to Paris on lathered horses, 
the flames of the Spanish revolution, bursting forth 
with new fury, lit up the southern sky behind him, 
while the camp fires of the Austrians blazed before him in the 
northern sky. He was caught between two great wars, and 
must now take up arms against that sea of troubles whereon 
he was to battle for six years with the ever-rising waves of 
disaster which at last were to dash him upon the rock of St. 
Helena. 

At four o'clock of an April morning in 1809, the Emperor, 
with Josephine beside him in his coach, started for the front 
to enter upon his last victorious campaign. After leaving the 
Empress at Strasburg and making calls on two kings along the 
way, he arrived at the headquarters of his army in ninety- 
seven hours. The distance from Paris by rail is about 500 
miles, and the time by express train to-day is twenty hours. 

Napoleon instantly grasped the reins, and in an hour his 
couriers were spurring their horses in every direction with 
orders designed to unite the army against the Austrian forces. 
" Activity!" "Activity!" ''Rapidity!" he scrawled in a 
postscript to Massena. The hills and valleys everywhere rang 
with salvos announcing to the soldiers that the Great Captain 
had come. 

There followed one of the most brilliant weeks in his mili- 
tary life. After fighting four or five battles in as many days, 
he stood at the brink of the moat around the mediaeval walls 
of Ratisbon, when he was struck in the right heel by a long- 
range Tyrolean rifle. Although the ball "scarcely razed the 

272 



HIS LAST VICTORY 273 

tendon Achilles," he assured Josephine in a letter, it inflicted 
a painful sting. 

As he sat on a drum, while a surgeon dressed the wound, 
thousands of his soldiers broke ranks and surrounded him, in- 
different to the Austrian guns, which were pelting the excited 
assemblage. To disperse the group and reassure the army, he 
mounted his horse and rode down the lines on waves of cheers. 
Pausing before each command, he called upon the commanders 
to name the men under them deserving of special honours. 
Privates and corporals and sergeants were transformed there 
on the field into knights of the Empire and chevaliers of the 
Legion of Honour. That extraordinary review under fire 
having been finished, he ordered the scaling ladders against 
the old town wall and returned to his hillock, where as Brown- 
ing portrays him 

A mile or so away on a little mound, 
Napoleon stood on our storming day, 

With neck outthrust, you fancy how; 
Legs wide, arms locked behind 

As if to balance the prone brow 
Oppressive with his mind. 

One week after the Emperor's arrival at headquarters, he 
was within the fortress walls of Ratisbon, and the Austrian 
Archduke Charles was running off into the wilds of Bohemia. 
The victorious invaders poured down the valley in a torrent 
that overwhelmed all the strongholds on the road to Vienna. 
While Napoleon was riding with Berthier and Lannes one day, 
he saw the towers of the old castle of Dirnstein reaching sky- 
ward from its rock beside the Danube. As he pointed to the 
towers, he told his companions the story of an emperor that 
had treacherously imprisoned within those castle walls, Rich- 
ard Cceur de Lion, who, like themselves, had fought at the 
gate of Acre. 

How far removed are we now from those barbarous times ! ' ' 
he exclaimed. "I have had princes, kings, and emperors in 
my power, and, far from taking away their liberty, I have not 
exacted a single sacrifice of their honour. Would they do as 
much for me?" The party rode on in silence, the Emperor's 



274 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

gaze still fixed upon the castled ruin. But in his reverie he 
probably did not dream how much less kind fate could be, 
even in a later time, than it was to Richard the captive of 
Dirnstein ! 

At the opening of the campaign, the Emperor Francis with 
his court had journeyed to the front to enjoy the confidently 
expected triumph of his arms over the conqueror of Auster- 
litz. Even as the army fell back in the first days, misleading 
reports of victories had stimulated the spirits of the Viennese 
and of the imperial family at the capital. 

When she heard the false news of victory, the young Arch- 
duchess Marie Louise, who had already been twice driven from 
her home by Napoleon, wrote this pathetic and childish letter to 
her father, the Emperor: 

We have heard with delight that Napoleon was present at the great 
battle which the French lost. May he lose his- head as well ! There 
are a great many prophecies about his speedy end, and people say 
that the Apocalypse applies to him. They say he is going to die 
this year at Cologne in an inn called the Red Crawfish. I do not 
attach much importance to these prophecies, but how glad I should 
be to see them come true ! 

Napoleon had announced to his army at Ratisbon that he 
would be in Vienna in a month. In less than three weeks he was 
dating his orders from Schonbrunn, the palace of the Haps- 
burgs. There he strolled in the leafy lanes, for which Marie 
Louise was sighing in her banishment, and he slept in the very 
room where in the yet veiled future her son and his was to 
languish and die in exile. 

He was once more master of the Austrian capital, as in 1805. 
No sooner had he entered the city than he opened a campaign 
that remains unique in the history of warfare. He was still 
confronted by the army of the Archduke Charles. Between 
them flowed the Danube, the bridges over which had been 
destroyed by the Austrians as they evacuated the city. 

The mountainous banks of the upper Danube, rising almost 
sheer 500 and 1000 feet on either side, often shut it in a narrow 
bed. Those cliff-like walls give way as the river approaches 



HIS LAST VICTORY 275 

Vienna, and its pent up waters burst upon and spread over a 
great plain, the Marchfield, forming there a remarkable tangle 
of islands. Seizing upon those islands as stepping stones, 
Napoleon, with his customary rapidity, threw bridges of boats 
from island to island a few miles below the city. In hardly 
more than a week after his capture of Vienna, he began to 
march his army across to the northern bank. 

Although within sight of the Byzantine domes and towers 
of the great city of Vienna, which has grown from a popula- 
tion of 200,000 to more than 2,000,000, the historic plain of 
the Marchfield remains to-day, with the exception of a street 
car line, the same simple, quiet country side that it was when 
the battle of the empires burst upon it and broke its stillness in 
the first decade of the nineteenth century. The wide, open field 
lying in front of the desolate wooded island of Lobau is even 
now dedicated to military use, but not to a combat of foot and 
horse, as in 1809. The big, ungainly hangar of the Austrian 
army rises in the meadow, and out of its barn-like door such 
chariots of war sail into the air as would have struck Napoleon 
dumb with amazement. 

Beyond that "flugfeld" by the Danube, and a mile or more 
from Lobau, two little stone villages dot the plain. The one 
on the right is Essling and the one on the left Aspern. Na- 
poleon ordered his advancing forces to seize those hamlets and 
convert their stone cottages and stone walls into forts. 

The Archduke Charles stood on the crown of the Bisamberg, 
which lifts itself like a grandstand at the upper end of the 
Marchfield, when he saw his audacious antagonist thus cast 
the gauntlet at his feet. Charles eagerly accepted the bold 
challenge of an army divided by a river. 

Only 30,000 French had crossed, when the Archduke de- 
scended the plain in five columns and hurled 80,000 Austrians 
upon their left and right wings at Aspern and Essling. Na- 
poleon sat in the brickyard at Essling while Marshal Lannes 
beat off the storm of battle which beset that town. Six times 
in that May afternoon, Aspern was tossed back and forth like 
a ball. 

When night fell, the French and the Austrians were clinched 



276 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

in the churchyard square of Aspern and only broke away 
to bivouac, leaving their outposts at opposite ends of the vil- 
lage, to glare at one another around the street corners. Na- 
poleon himself lay through the night in the grass by the bridge, 
urging on the reinforcements from the other side of the river. 
Once the bridge broke under the pressure of the swiftening 
current, but the rickety structure was fastened together again. 

When, at two o'clock in the morning, Charles' batteries 
suddenly belched fire in the darkness and poured their lava 
streams upon Massena's command in Aspern, there were in all 
only 55,000 French to face him. Having received word that 
Davout, the lion of Auerstadt and Eckmiihl, was crossing to 
his assistance, Napoleon ordered Lannes and Bessieres to throw 
themselves upon the Austrian centre. 

Seeing his line between the villages breaking under the blow, 
Charles seized an Austrian flag and, with reckless daring, 
dashed forth beneath its waving folds, and rallied and led 
his troops forward. As so often happened in the old warfare, 
the tide of a great battle was turned by one man, and the 
Archduke's gallantry at that moment is celebrated in a spirited 
statue which stands in the centre of Vienna. 

While Napoleon was exerting himself to steady his lines as 
they fell back, he received the appalling news that the Danube 
had risen in his rear. Nature had cut his communications. 
The mighty river was booming with a spring freshet, which, 
sweeping trees and boats from its banks, hurled them against 
the main pontoon of the French, between Lobau and the 
Vienna shore. As this great bridge was smashed and swept 
away in the thunderous torrent, Davout with his army, 
stood by the opposite shore a helpless spectator of his Em- 
peror's desperate plight. Even the ammunition supplies were 
cut off, for nothing could be ferried over the swollen waters. 

Napoleon was compelled to sound retreat for the first time 
since he was turned back from the walls of Acre. And now 
a flood threatened him with greater perils than he met in 
the arid desert. Even if the frail, creaking bridge from the 
Aspern shore to Lobau withstood the buffets of the angry 
river, he still must beat off the victorious foe the remainder 



HIS LAST VICTORY 277 

of tho morning and throughout the afternoon, in order to get 
his tens of thousands of men over to the island under cover of 
darkness. 

Massena, afoot and sword in hand, held back the Austrians 
all day at the Aspern church, and the statue of a lion which 
now stands in the churchyard even more fittingly expresses his 
defence than the Austrian victory which it was erected to 
commemorate. Meanwhile Lannes faced the Austrian centre 
and parried its blows until he had only 300 grenadiers. His 
horses were dead and his cartridges gone. But in a message 
to the Emperor he gave his pledge, "I will hold out to the 
last." And he left the field only when borne off dying. A 
cannon ball rolling along the ground had given him his thir- 
teenth battle wound and carried away both legs. 

When the sun had gone down at last on a day of frightful 
sacrifices, the retreat to Lobau was made in the shadow of 
night. In thirty hours of fighting, the Austrians had lost more 
than 20,000 men, and the French quite as many from their 
smaller force. 

Soon secret messengers were speeding throughout the Em- 
pire and whispering the news that the child of destiny had 
received a parental chastisement, that the favourite of for- 
tune was not invincible. Two of his armies had surrendered 
within a year, and now even he himself had been defeated. 
Great, if silent, was the rejoicing in Germany and wherever 
an imperial eagle perched above a subjugated people. 

Napoleon, however, was moving with no less decision and 
vigour to repair a defeat than if he were taking measures to 
complete a victory. He at once set his army to the task of 
conquering the Danube, while he summoned reinforcements 
from every quarter. At the end of six arduous wonder- 
working weeks, he had 200,000 soldiers at Vienna and was 
ready to make good his boast that "the Danube exists no 
more. ' ' 

A bridge of sixty arches and wide enough for three carriages 
to pass abreast had been completed to Lobau ; another bridge 
eight feet wide had been constructed on piles, and a third 
bridge, formed of boats, was in readiness. The army thus on 



278 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

July 1 could advance in three columns, and on that day the 
Emperor himself pitched his tent on the great island. Thence, 
dressed as sergeants, he and Marshal Massena personally recon- 
noitred the northern bank of the river, under the eyes of 
Austrian sentries, who, seeing them take off their coats, were 
not unkind enough to molest two common soldiers out for a 
bath. 

The next deception perpetrated upon the enemy was a more 
serious one. A bridge was thrown across from Lobau on the 
site of the old bridge in the Aspern-Essling fight. The Arch- 
duke Charles, therefore, prepared for a renewel of the struggle 
on the same lines as before. But in two hours of the dark and 
stormy night of July 4, six pontoon bridges were thrown across 
from the farther end of the island without attracting the fire 
or even the attention of the foe. 

By noon of July 5, Napoleon stood on the Marchfield again, 
but this time with 180,000 men behind him and only 140,000 
Austrians in front of him. Sweeping around Charles' well 
constructed entrenchments about Aspern, he aimed his blow 
straight at the village of Wagram, nearly ten miles across the 
plain from the former battlefield. His object was to strike 
the left wing of the Austrians in that village and cut off an- 
other army which was then hurrying to the aid of Charles. 

The battle did not begin until seven in the evening. Al- 
though Marshal Bernadotte with his German troops succeeded 
in capturing "Wagram, they lost it in a few minutes, and Na- 
poleon bivouacked that night with one more defeat recorded 
against him. Still he was up at break of day and the real 
Battle of Wagram was in full fury as early as four o'clock. 

More than 300,000 men were trampling the tall wheat of 
the Marchfield and wrestling for the possession of the little 
cluster of stone cottages which constituted the hamlet of Wag- 
ram. Fired by their repeated successes, the Austrians at 
once took the offensive and held it for six hours. At ten 
o'clock they saw the left wing of the French army crumpling 
and opening the way toward the bridges. If they could seize 
the bridges, a. fatal blow would be dealt the enemy's lines. 

Napoleon met that perilous situation not only by strengthen- 



HIS LAST VICTORY 279 

ing his left wing, but also by bringing up 100 guns and train- 
ing them at half-range on the Austrian centre. The effect was 
the same as a heavy blow on the centre of the human anatomy. 
The triumphant Austrian army stopped, winded. Then Na- 
poleon moved forward to turn Charles' left at Wagram, toward 
which Davout and Macdonald pushed through blazing wheat 
fields, where all who fell were cremated in the flames. At two 
o'clock, Charles, cut off from hope of reinforcements, was in 
retreat toward the north country. Once more — and for the 
last time — Napoleon had brought to a close a victorious cam- 
paign. 

The Marchfield was strewn with the bodies of nearly 
50,000 dead and wounded, equally divided between the two 
armies. Nearly a hundred thousand men had fallen on that 
little plain in six weeks and twenty villages had been wrecked, 
to determine which of two nations should possess distant lands 
that belonged to neither. 

Although Napoleon had been in the field three months, he 
had not, as in other campaigns, overwhelmed and destroyed the 
enemy. He was content to accept an armistice while Charles' 
army still bore aloft the banner of Austria. 

For already he was plunged into still another war, with a 
court older even than that of Vienna, with an empire far wider 
than that of the Hapsburgs. By his command, the soldiers of 
King Murat had entered Rome, planted the eagles of the new 
Cgesar on the Castle of St. Angelo and drawn up a battery 
before the door of the Quirinal, then the palace of Pope 
Pius VII. 

To control the ports of the Papal States against the British, 
Napoleon had first annexed the upper states to the kingdom of 
Italy. The Papacy still refusing to join the continental union 
against England, the Emperor next swept away entirely its 
temporal sovereignty. Thereupon Pius retorted with a bull 
excommunicating and anathematising all who took part in 
despoiling the Holy See. 

While the hosts of Napoleon and Charles were sleeping on 
their arms before Vienna, a commander of gendarmerie broke 
down the doors and stalked into the Quirinal on the night of 



280 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

July 5-6, where the Pope, wearing his mozetta and stole, re- 
signedly awaited his fate. In the name of the Emperor, Pius 
was commanded to renounce his temporal sovereignty, and, 
upon his refusal, he was placed under arrest. He asked only 
for two hours in which to prepare for his departure ; but this 
respite was denied. 

Taking with him nothing but his breviary and his crucifix, 
the Pope emerged from the palace, and silently blessed the 
sleeping city. Then stepping into the coach provided for him, 
its doors were locked and his imprisonment had begun. When 
the sun rose above the Sabine Hills and gleamed on the dome 
of St. Peter's, the heir of the Fisherman was being hurried 
away in his prison van toward his captivity at Savona, the 
Savona from which Napoleon himself rode out one moonlight 
night to burst into fame on the heights of Montenotte. Now 
it was to become a station on his path to St. Helena. 

Although the Emperor pointed to the arrest of Pope Boni- 
face and Pope Clement VII by Philippe le Bel and Charles V 
as his warrant, the Christian world, regardless of sect, viewed 
his carrying off of Pius as the most unwarranted of his acts. 
The Papal States, it is true, were like a wedge in his empire, 
cutting off the kingdom of Naples from the kingdom of Italy. 
But he had already annexed those states of the church, and 
his arrest of the aged Pontiff could not be justified on the 
lowest grounds of policy. It was another deed that merited 
the cynic 's censure as something worse than a crime — it was a 
blunder. 

Napoleon's negotiations meanwhile with the Emperor Fran- 
cis dragged their slow pace through the summer. He had 
struck off a spurious issue of Austrian bank notes amounting 
to $60,000,000, and was prepared to flood and bankrupt the 
country with them when, in October, Francis tardily yielded 
to his terms. To ransom his capital, the Austrian Emperor 
gave up territories having a population of 3,500,000 and paid 
a war indemnity of $16,000,000, besides agreeing to the hu- 
miliating condition that he should disband half his army. By 
this latest cession, a part of Austrian Poland was transferred 
to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which was under the sov- 



HIS LAST VICTORY 281 

ereignty of the King of Saxony, and the frontiers of the 
kingdoms of Bavaria and Italy were moved closer to Vienna. 

The day after the agreement was made a mighty explosion 
shook Vienna like an earthquake and left its walls in ruins. 
Not satisfied with the reduction of the Austrian army, Na- 
poleon had ordered that the Austrian capital be dismantled. 
The Viennese were greatly outraged by the blowing up of 
their ramparts, but time and art have healed the wound. For 
where the ugly bastions once rose and encircled the town, the 
Ring, that unique and beautiful promenade, now winds its 
noble way, and is become the proudest boast of the present-day 
Vienna. 

As Napoleon was levelling the old wall of Vienna, a new 
wall was being raised in France. Orders had come from him 
while he was at Schonbrunn that the private passage between 
his apartments and the Empress' in the palace of Fontaine- 
bleau should be closed. The hammers of the workmen on that 
partition really knelled the doom of Josephine. 

The conquest of Europe having been completed, the con- 
queror had determined at last to divorce his wife and seek in 
a new union an heir to perpetuate his empire. The walls of 
Vienna still lay in a heap four months after Napoleon 's depar- 
ture from the city, when Berthier, Prince of Wagram, climbed 
over them to demand from the Emperor Francis another prize 
of victory, the hand of his daughter, the Archduchess Marie 
Louise, in marriage with Napoleon. 



CHAPTER XXXIV 

THE UNCONQUERED SEX 

SOME one has made the discovery that Shakespeare, al- 
though he had 15,000 words in his vocabulary, had to 
repeat the term love 1500 times in the course of his 
matchless story of the human race. Yet that magic little word 
has no place in the biography of Napoleon. In the most 
crowded life that ever was lived, one chapter was left blank. 

Not that the Great Captain was a misogynist. It is really 
amazing to contemplate the time and attention bestowed upon 
womankind by this busiest man the world ever saw. It is 
hardly necessary to hark back to those naming messages to 
Josephine from that first Italian campaign, when the Little 
Corporal's pulse beat higher for love than for glory. The 
flames subsided, it is true, but not because the fire burnt out ; 
it was only smothered. When the bitter cynic, Marmont, tells 
us that "never did a purer, truer or more exclusive love fill 
a man's heart or the heart of so extraordinary a man," we 
cannot ask for a more credible witness. 

No woman seems to have touched that heart without leaving 
upon it an ineffaceable impression. Mile. Colombier, the little 
girl who picked cherries with the sublieutenant at Valence, 
needed only to address the Emperor to have him open wide 
his cornucopia above her no longer youthful or comely head 
and shower upon her a post of honour as lady in waiting at 
the court of Mme. Mere and upon her husband a barony, with 
comfortable emoluments. Another maid of Valence, whose 
smile had cast a faint ray upon his melancholy path by the 
Rhone, found herself elevated to the station of lady in waiting 
to the Empress, and her husband, M. de Montalivet, appointed 
a member of the ministry and a count of the Empire. 

He bore everything from and did everything for his most 

282 



THE UNCONQUERED SEX 283 

faithless and useless marshal because he was the husband of 
Desiree Clary, a sweetheart of his own young manhood, saying, 
"Bernadotte may thank his marriage for his baton, his prin- 
cipality of Pontecorvo and the crown of Sweden." 

Although his own sisters looked upon the eagle, which 
freakish nature had smuggled into their barnyard brood, as 
only a bird to be plucked, Pauline alone among them having 
the slightest emotion for him, he lavished fondness upon his 
stepdaughter, his sister-in-law and upon the Beauharnais 
nieces and cousins. ' ' Hortense, " he said, in his admiration 
of Josephine's daughter, "forces me to believe in virtue." 

"When Princess Catherine of Wurtemberg came to Paris to 
marry Jerome, and knelt terrified at the Emperor's feet, he 
picked her up, gathered the awkward young German girl in 
his arms, kissed her, and with his gentleness did more than any 
of the women of the court to place her at ease. In the Prin- 
cess Augusta of Bavaria, wife of Prince Eugene, he inspired 
the fealty of a daughter. His letter of instructions to the 
young husband discloses a sensible domestic code : ' ' You 
need more gaiety in your house ; it is necessary for your wife 's 
happiness and for your health. I lead the life that you lead, 
but I have an old wife who can amuse herself without me, and 
besides I have more to do." 

The Emperor's indulgence toward Stephanie, Aunt Fanny 
Beauharnais' granddaughter, whom he adopted as his own 
daughter and married to the Prince of Baden, made that 
young lady the spoiled child of the Empire. When Josephine 
brought a little cousin from Martinique, he promptly married 
her to the Prince d 'Arenberg. The marriage was an unhappy 
one and the bride ran away from her groom, whereupon the 
Emperor gave her a liberal allowance that enabled her to dis- 
pense with an unpleasant husband. 

"Kind, gentle, persuasive women" were his choice, and such 
as they could go far with him. He would brook no self asser- 
tion from them on any point. He believed in training wives 
in the way they should walk. To the Duchess of Dalmatia, 
wife of Marshal Soult, he said : ' ' Madam, recollect I am not 
your husband. If I were, you would behave very differently. " 



284 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

He would have no sex equality. "Women, he insisted, should 
not be regarded as "men's equals, for after all they are only 
the machinery for turning out children." He would have 
thanked a twentieth century emperor for his alliterative epi- 
gram on the limitation of women to "children, church, and 
cooking." In his scheme of education for girls there were to 
be no blue stockings. "Make them believers, not rea- 
soners," he instructed the educators. 

An amusing dread and jealousy of the influence and inde- 
pendence of the sex are betrayed in a hundred of his sayings. 
He really placed women on a level with the English, the Aus- 
trians, and the Russians as a peril to his mastery, seeming to 
look upon woman as a competing sovereignty seated upon a 
rival throne and disputing with him for the dictatorship of 
the earth. "A minister of state," he declared, "should never 
allow a woman to approach his cabinet." He would establish 
a quarantine against this insidious enemy and make the Em- 
pire exclusively masculine. 

Such a segregation of the sexes as he proposed is nowhere 
more absurdly impossible than in France, where the great 
ladies of the salons, sharing in the discussions, the intrigues, 
and the ambitions of philosophers and statesmen, only reflect 
the fashions of the women of the peasantry, who have an equal 
part with the men in the counsels of the cottage. 

Even war is not suffered to interrupt the comradeship of the 
sexes in France. The vivandiere, or cantine woman, dressed 
in the finery and mounted on the horse stolen for her by the 
soldiers, with her keg of brandy in front and her bologna 
sausage and cheese all around her, was at first the daughter 
and next the sister before she mellowed into the mother of the 
regiment, unless indeed she married in the meantime and be- 
came a duchess, like Mme. Sans Gene, or a baroness or a 
countess, like many others of her calling. Her tent was the 
club, and her purse the bank for officers and soldiers alike, 
while she braved wounds and death in battle by carrying re- 
freshments to the thirsty and famishing firing line. 

In all the campaigns of Napoleon, his army was followed 
by its "love escort." Such a band of wives and children, ac- 



THE UNCONQUERED SEX 285 

tresses, dancers, and thousands of adventurous women as never 
attended any other than a French military organisation, 
brought up the rear of the Grand Army in all manner of wagons 
and carts, on donkey back and afoot. With the fortitude of 
grenadiers, they endured the heat of Spain and the snows of 
Russia, and, pausing at the foot of a tree to receive a call from 
the stork, the hardy mothers, with their babes in their arms, 
quickly overtook the advancing columns. 

In his earlier campaigns, Napoleon tried hard to shake off 
this "love escort." But, although he threatened to smudge 
the faces of the women, they defied him, and there is no record 
of such a cruel punishment of their vanity. He took all pos- 
sible precautions against any woman accompanying his army 
to Egypt, but many slipped aboard his ship as stowaways or in 
soldiers' uniforms. The eternal feminine was with him still 
in his retreat from Moscow, where women who had grown 
families in his camps and kept step with his legions for sixteen 
years, followed his footprints in the snow. 

Notwithstanding he had failed in his efforts to keep them 
out of his camp, he declared that "Women shall have no in- 
fluence at my court." Affecting a brave air, he exclaimed, 
"What do I care for the tittle-tattle of the drawing rooms? 
All I care for is the opinion of decent peasants." Yet he 
made a detective a duke to reward Fouche 's diligence and skill 
in providing ears for the walls of the salons of Paris. 

It was a pity the eagle could not soar above the idle gossip 
in the boudoirs of the old nobility. He never lost his sensitive- 
ness to their snubs. Mme. de Narbonne, although the Em- 
peror honoured her son with important missions, could not be 
brought to demean herself with more than two or three very 
perfunctory appearances at court each year. The son, how- 
ever, proved himself a clever diplomat in his apologies, when 
the Emperor said in a grieved tone, "I fear your mother does 
not like me." 

"Sire," the young count replied, "my mother has not yet 
advanced beyond the stage of admiration." 

Napoleon recognised the queenship of women, but he wished 
them to be like his fellow sovereigns of the male species, satel- 



286 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

lites revolving around his own planetary body. He always 
stood ready to be their protector if only they would be his 
allies. 

His fatherly care over the "weaker sex" knew almost no 
bounds. He required every subprefect in France to make a 
list of the daughters of the most notable families within his 
jurisdiction, and an estimate of the probable inheritance of 
each girl. At that time he contemplated a sort of card index 
system, under which he would betroth to his poor but deserving 
civil and military officers all the heiresses in the country hav- 
ing yearly incomes of $10,000 or more. Ever eager to lend a 
helping hand to cupid, he married one of Josephine's maids to 
Constant, his valet, and giving the Duke of Gaeta, his minister 
of finance, two years in which to marry, he thoughtfully added, 
"If you wish, I will arrange it for you." 

In his ambition to dazzle the world with their brilliance and 
beauty, he surrounded his throne with women. They were, 
however, to be merely a studiously arranged tableau, and he 
succeeded in making his court the most splendid and the most 
stupid in Europe. 

The fashions and customs of women not only interested him 
personally but politically as well, for he saw their possible 
usefulness to him in his trade war with England. His court 
was commanded to give up the use of imported tea and sugar 
and all manner of British fabrics. "It is a contest of life and 
death between France and England," he said, "and every 
French teapot and sugar basin and work basket must be em- 
ployed as weapons in the war." Calling fashion to his side 
as an ally, he promoted the return to the silks of Lyons in 
the styles of the Empire for men as well as women, and laid 
a ban on the simpler and soberer republican garb that had 
come into favour at the Revolution. He led Parisian dress- 
makers away from their preference for goods made of cotton, 
which had to come by the blockaded sea, to linens and lawn 
woven of flax, and the merino sheep of Spain, no longer yield- 
ing their fleece to the woollen manufacturers of England, gave 
the mills of the continent a monopoly of the finest wool in the 
world. 




Women of the Imperial Family 
1, Betsy Paterson Bonaparte, 2, Queen Caroline of Naples, 3, Prin- 
cess Pauline, 4, Queen Hortense of Holland, 5, Mine. Mere, 6, Grand 
Duchess Elisa of Tuscany 



THE UNCONQUERED SEX 287 

Not by the Emperor's direction, but in his honour, the 
fashion makers brought out Oriental ideas that recalled his 
campaign in the east. One momentous departure was made 
without any apparent relation to him. That was the introduc- 
tion of corsets in the winter of 1809. 

Napoleon's weakness for the sex really was unmistakably 
betrayed in his inordinate interest in the dress and toilet of 
women, which he criticised as if he were inspecting his soldiers' 
uniforms. ' ' Go and put on some rouge, madam, you look like 
a corpse!" "How red your elbows are!" "Good God! 
They told me you were pretty!" "That is a fine mantle of 
yours; I must have seen it twenty times!" "Heavens, but 
isn't your hair red!" — these are among the reported ejacula- 
tions at which the women of the court circle trembled as His 
Imperial Majesty made his rounds. 

He never planned more closely the operations of his army in 
the field than he planned the amusements of his court. He 
gave great theatrical performances, but people were afraid to 
applaud. Young girls yawned and fell asleep in the heavy 
atmosphere of the Tuileries. It palled upon even the Em- 
peror himself, and in his weariness with the functions of his 
own devising, he fidgeted about on the throne at the splendid 
ceremonials. 

Paris had grown dizzy in the waltz, which Napoleon's sol- 
diers had discovered — or rediscovered — in the Jena campaign, 
when the conquering army saw the Germans forgetting their 
national woes in its dreamy whirl. Although Napoleon's old 
dancing teacher in Valence had put in an appearance and an 
application, saying, "Sire, it is I who once guided your steps," 
the pupil never was a credit to his instructor. "When the Em- 
peror tried his awkward feet in a gavotte at Warsaw, he asked 
the Countess Potocka how he danced. The Countess* reply is 
a model : ' ' Sire, for a great man, you dance perfectly ! ' ' The 
great man, however, was not so great a fool and he knew 
better. 

Good people in France were sorely outraged by the strange 
dance from Germany. Although it invaded even the frigid 
precincts of the Tuileries, the Emperor did not shock the 



288 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

prudes by taking it up, for whenever he tried to waltz, that 
marvellous head of his grew dizzy and lost its balance. 

To give his people a change of scene, Napoleon at stated 
times transferred his court to country palaces, preferably Fon- 
tainebleau, which Josephine detested. On those occasions, the 
vast pile was crowded with a population equal to that of a 
town, requiring as many as 1100 beds to be made in the chateau 
and as many as 3000 covers laid at dinner. The apartments 
were assigned to the guests as in a big hotel, while the duties 
of entertaining were divided among the members of the im- 
perial family. If the Emperor gave a reception this evening, 
another evening was marked by a card party under the hos- 
pitality of the Empress, while on other evenings there were 
plays or musicales, followed by balls under the patronage of 
the princesses. The princes, the ministers, the grand marshal, 
and the ladies of honour, each with a dining table in his or 
her apartment — once there were fifty-two tables to be served — 
gave all the dinners, and thus left the Emperor at liberty to 
take refuge from the jaded mob of courtiers in a private 
dinner with the Empress and whomsoever else he chose. 

The social evolutions of each day were scheduled as in a 
military training camp. Breakfast over at eleven o'clock, the 
ladies turned to tapestry work ; at two the men went hunting, 
returning at eight or nine, whereupon the Emperor was likely 
to tap his watch and say, "I give the ladies ten minutes to 
dress for dinner." Sometimes a great levee was scheduled for 
Sunday morning, which obliged all those from Paris to travel 
most of the night, merely to stand in silence against the wall of 
a corridor at Fontainebleau while the Emperor passed as in a 
review of the Guard, perhaps without a word or a look, after 
which the long return journey to the city began. 

Spite of his tireless efforts to give his court a good time, the 
Emperor grieved: "Is it not strange! I brought all these 
people out to Fontainebleau ; I wished them to be amused and 
I arranged every sort of pleasure. Yet here they are, with 
long faces, all looking bored and tired." 

Talleyrand explained, with the candour which the Emperor 
permitted him in the privacy of the cabinet, ' ' Sire, that is be- 



THE UNCONQUERED SEX 289 

cause pleasure cannot be summoned at the tap of a drum. 
Your Majesty always seems to say to us, 'Come, ladies and 
gentlemen, forward, march ! ' " 

One night at Fontainebleau, as the imperial party was com- 
ing from a production of the ' ' Marriage of Figaro, ' ' the wife 
of Marshal Lannes, the Duchess of Montebello, sighed: "To 
think that once I let myself be almost trampled and smothered 
to see that play, and now I find nothing amusing in it ! " Na- 
poleon replied, ' ' That is because then you were in the pit, and 
now you are in a box ! ' ' 

Dreary as the court of the Empire must have been, it had the 
then rare merit of apparent cleanliness, at least. It is true 
that Napoleon, when he assumed the crown assumed at the 
same time the ancient prerogative of monarchs to be a moral 
law unto himself. It is true, he proclaimed, "I stand apart 
from other men ; I accept no one 's conditions ! ' ' Nevertheless 
he continued to pay virtue the tribute of not openly adopting 
the now incredibly low standards which generally prevailed 
among royalty in a time when the palaces of Europe were 
houses of shame, and when there was not yet a democratic 
public opinion to restrain princes and princesses and compel 
them to seem as decent as common people. 

It was the obscene age when that obese debauchee, George IV 
of England, then Prince of "Wales, typified monarchial morals 
and reigned as "the first gentleman of Europe." The Hohen- 
zollerns were as abandoned a lot as any about a throne when 
Louise married into the family and united her homely virtues 
with those of Frederick William to lift the court of Berlin out 
of the mire. Czar Alexander was altogether worthy of his 
grandmother who brought him up, the naughty Catherine. 

If Napoleon did not surpass the morals of his fellow- 
sovereigns he was not guilty of their brazen affronts to the 
moral sensibilities of his subjects, but furtively tread the prim- 
rose path at double quick. He broke no lance, like Henry II, 
for a Diane de Poitiers ; in the Empire, France saw no Val- 
liere, no Montespan, no Maintenon successively playing the 
political boss with a Louis XIV; saw no Pompadour wast- 
ing the substance of the people in riotous living with a Louis 



290 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

XV ; nor a Barry throwing state papers in the fire and mocking 
the interests of the nation. 

While Napoleon was on the German campaign in the winter 
of 1806, his first son was borne him in Paris by Eleonore — 
Eleonore Revel — and through seventy-five years of a worthless, 
rascally life, the Count de Leon carried the certificate of his 
paternal origin stamped on his face, which he proudly boasted 
as his "glorious resemblance." The Emperor appointed his 
secretary, the Baron de Meneval, to be one of the child's 
guardians, and made liberal provisions for the boy before his 
final remembrance of him in his will. 

The other son, who was born in 1810, became, as Count 
Walewski, a distinguished statesman of the Second Empire, 
serving under Napoleon III as ambassador to London, minister 
of foreign affairs, minister of state, and as president of the 
corps legislatif until his death in 1868. The Count's mother, 
the only well-defined figure among the pathetic shades in the 
background of Napoleon, was the beautiful twenty-two-year- 
old wife of an old Polish noble when, in the enthusiastic emo- 
tion that swept her unhappy Poland at its liberation from 
Prussia, she smiled upon the liberator of her people at Warsaw, 
in the winter of 1806-07. To this day the Poles cherish her 
memory as one who gave her love for her country. Even her 
aged husband and his family appear to have been content to 
see the beautiful patriot gain the confidence of the master of 
their nation's destiny. For M. Walewski 's sisters were her 
chaperones when she took up her residence in Paris, where 
she dwelt in the deepest seclusion. 

It is not clearly written in history that the most brilliant 
man in its pages, with grace on his brow, the front of Jove and 
the eye of Mars, ever won the love of any woman. Yet the 
fault may not have been so much in the man as in his star, 
which forever lured him from home-felt pleasures and gentle 
scenes. ' ' Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon the throne 
a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his own orig- 
inality." Fortune shed upon him the glory of victory and 
power, and showered upon him sceptres and crowns, but she 
withheld a blessing common to men, great and small, worthy 



THE UNCONQUERED SEX 291 

and unworthy — the pure, unselfish love of two good women, a 
mother and a wife. 

Letizia Bonaparte, with ' ' the head of a man on the shoulders 
of a woman," was the stern and noble mother bird of an eagle, 
but her virtuous and dutiful breast was no fountain of affec- 
tion. Nor did the eagle, after mewing his mighty youth in 
monasteries and barracks, receive any response to the wild 
throbbings in his bosom when he swooped down upon 
Josephine's dove cote. 

Thereupon he bade his heart to dismiss its distracting illu- 
sions, and thenceforth he omitted from his scheme of universal 
conquest the hemisphere of womankind. Men were intoxi- 
cated by his glance, and died by the thousands to win his 
smile. In the midst of a prostrate world, however, woman- 
hood stood erect and unconquered, and it is doubtful if any 
woman lost either her head or her heart as the Great Unloved 
marched on to his destiny. 



CHAPTER XXXV 
THE DIVORCE 

1809 AGE 40 

WHILE Napoleon dwelt in the palace of the fugitive 
Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria at Schon- 
brunn, in 1809, and occupied the room of the 
future King of Rome, he formed the long-deferred resolution 
to divorce Josephine, and, marrying a daughter of one of the 
ancient dynasties, provide an heir to his throne. 

As the victor of Wagram, in the pride of success and the 
responsibility of power, walked the palace halls of the Haps- 
burgs, his determination ripened that the inheritor of his 
glory and his conquests, should be at once a child of his own 
potent blood and the scion of a race of kings. He saw no 
other way to lift the imperial succession above the ugly 
jealousies and conspiracies that had already divided the Bona- 
partes and place it beyond the rivalry of the more ambitious 
marshals who stood ready to fight for the crown among them- 
selves. 

Like his only companions in fame, he was childless, but he 
would not, like Alexander, bequeath his kingdom to the 
strongest, or, like Caesar, adopt a nephew. All the while the 
same superserviceable faction which, for its own profit, had 
paved his way to fhe life Consulate, and then to the throne, 
was eagerly plotting, in season and out, to have him marry 
again and leave a successor to that throne by which its mem- 
bers lived. 

Wagram seems to have decided the issue, when it confirmed 
anew Napoleon's title to the vastest and richest estate in the 
world. The Empress did not miss the calamitous significance 
of that battle to her, nor fail to understand that in her hus- 

292 



THE DIVORCE 293 

band's victory she had lost her fight. On his return to 
Paris, he found Josephine's creditors, alarmed by her sink- 
ing fortunes, clamouring for money, and he was amazed to 
learn that again she was floundering in debt. 

Extravagance appears to have been Josephine's one fault 
under the Empire. It is doubtful if she had given the Em- 
peror any other grievance since she took her place beside him 
on the throne. Once he cast her milliner in prison for sev- 
eral hours to frighten her out of her habit of extortion. Life 
imprisonment would not have corrected the reckless ex- 
penditures of the Empress, with her 500 chemises, her new 
pair of stockings for each dressing, her 300 or 400 cashmere 
shawls, some costing nearly $2500, and her robes of lace for 
which she paid as high as $20,000 each. Mme. de Remusat 
never entered a dressmaker's or a milliner's, go when she 
would, that she did not find something in the making for the 
Empress. Her annual allowance for dress rose as high as 
$90,000, but her credit being good, she spent as much as 
$220,000 in a year. Out of her yearly expenditures, how- 
ever, she accumulated most of her jewellery, which repre- 
sented at the time of the divorce an investment of nearly 
$1,000,000. 

Whenever creditors pressed and the inevitable time of 
reckoning came, the Empress cried and the Emperor raged, 
but not at her so much as at the tradesmen. Although he 
arbitrarily cut down their bills 30, 40, and 50 per cent., they 
were well enough satisfied with the profit still remaining to 
start at once a new campaign of temptation and a new ac- 
count with the Empress. 

Even in her weakness, however, there is to be found the 
source of Josephine's strength. Her Creole love of beauty 
and luxury, costly as it was, had framed a fitting background 
for Napoleon's imperial pretensions and made his court the 
foremost in the world when, had he been left to his own de- 
vices, it would have been nothing more than a military camp 
and the butt of scornful Europe. 

With a simple and genuine fondness for people, and with 
a native dignity free from the stiff hauteur, the icy arti- 



294 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

ficiality of women bred in royal palaces, the supple little is- 
lander from, the sugar loft of Martinique deftly blended a 
motley array of ex-sergeants and their garrison wives with 
the old nobility. Under her dainty touch, the Tuileries be- 
came the mould of form and the looking glass of fashion for 
all the ancient and frumpy courts of the continent. Even 
the English, although they blockaded Napoleon relentlessly, 
were eager enough to smuggle across to London the latest 
models from Josephine's dressmakers. 

While the Emperor was waging his military campaigns, it 
was no less her duty to conduct the Empress' social campaigns, 
and a censorious world could find no fault in her strategy. 
Her continual journey ings from palace to palace, from coun- 
try to country in tortuous coaches over racking roads weary 
and stagger the understanding. 

She lived wholly for Napoleon and his interests. Having 
no great ambitions of her own, no desire for power or 
grandeur, she did not meddle in politics, but in the spirit of a 
grocer's or banker's wife, she made it her main purpose in 
life to please her husband, look after his home and promote 
his success by being agreeable to his associates. Because she 
was the wife of an Emperor, whose home was a palace, whose 
business was ruling the world and whose associates were kings, 
princes and dukes, her duties were no lighter and no less 
difficult. 

"How this wearies me," she once exclaimed. "I have not 
a moment to myself. It would be better for me were I the 
wife of a labourer." Although diamond crowns and gilded 
salons cast their illusion over the scene of her splendid 
drudgery, Josephine could not have toiled harder had she 
been a labourer's wife. For three hours each day she slaved 
over her morning toilet, and thrice daily she changed her 
linen throughout. A mob of servitors and courtiers sur- 
rounded her morning, noon, and night. She breakfasted, 
lunched, and dined with them, and the repetition of some 
dreary function was scheduled for each waking hour. "Be 
gay! Be gay!" That was the imperial command always. 

However borne down under the burden of a crown, how- 



THE DIVORCE 295 

ever ill she might be, and she was not physically strong, how- 
ever hard her head ached, never did Josephine on her unend- 
ing round of petty tasks, disappoint the Emperor with a mis- 
step, a wrong word or a lacking smile. There never was an 
indiscreet remark, an intrigue, an act of favouritism on her 
part to embarrass her husband for a moment. He, who above 
all men valued every tick of the clock, never had to complain 
that she kept him waiting a minute. And when he was worn 
out by the cares of a crowded day, she, who never opened a 
book for her own enjoyment, lay across the foot of his bed 
and read him to sleep in that voice whose tones unfailingly 
entranced him. 

No man, monarch or peasant, could ask for a truer help- 
meet. But the lord of the earth was without an heir. 

The long dreaded hour struck for Josephine at the end of 
November, 1809, when Paris was in the midst of preparations 
for the celebration of the fifth anniversary of the coronation 
and from all the federated nations of the Empire, kings and 
queens, princes and princesses were thronging into the city. 
After a silent, mournful dinner in the Tuileries, the Emperor 
and Empress retired to his apartments, where, while she was 
holding the cup of coffee which he had just passed to her, he 
spoke the words that for many days had been struggling for 
expression. The historian of the tragic scene, in the person 
of the prefect of the palace, sitting in a chair tilted against 
the wall of the corridor outside the door, suddenly heard loud 
shrieks from the Emperor's room. An usher, who also heard 
them, would have opened the door had not his chief told him 
that the Emperor would call for assistance if he needed 
it. 

The prefect was right. In a moment the door opened and 
the Emperor stood before him, his eyes full of tears and his 
voice choking in his extreme agitation. The functionary 
entered the room, to find Josephine lying on the floor and 
uttering piercing cries : "I shall not survive it ! I shall not 
survive it ! " The Emperor asked the prefect to carry the 
stricken Empress down to her own apartments, on the floor 
below, and he took a candle off a table to light the way. The 



296 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

private stairs, however, proving too narrow for her to be car- 
ried down in one pair of arms, the Emperor gave the candle 
to the usher and helped the prefect bear her to her room. 

Having played the woman that brief while, Josephine 
quickly and bravely resumed the part of Empress. Nothing 
in her brilliant reign became her more than her farewell to 
her greatness. The fetes went on and, although she could not 
keep back the tears and summon the vanished smile, she faith- 
fully met all her duties in the mocking ceremonials. 

Queen Hortense, perked up in a glistering grief for her 
eldest son and wearing a golden sorrow in her loveless wed- 
lock, was unhappiness enthroned and could not understand 
why her mother should dread the loss of a crown. Josephine 
was a daughter of the sun, and, while she cared nothing for 
power, she was naturally proud of the success with which she 
had sat the highest throne of earth and retained the affection 
and merited the admiration of the foremost man of the world. 
If her early indifference had not really warmed into love for 
Napoleon, she had at least become, in their nearly fourteen 
years of married life, a fond and devoted wife, capable of feel- 
ing the pangs of jealousy. 

With the arrival of Eugene, the formal arrangements for his 
mother's divorce were entered upon. The son had anticipated 
the situation, and had written to her a month before that if 
the Emperor believed his happiness and the interests of 
France required him to have children, no consideration should 
be permitted to oppose him, and he invited Josephine, in event 
of divorce, to live with him in Italy. Finally, it fell to 
Eugene to make the first public announcement of the matter. 
"It is necessary for the happiness of France that the founder 
of this fourth dynasty should grow old, surrounded by his 
direct descendants as a guarantee to us all, ' ' he told the senate. 
"The tears that his resolution has drawn from the Emperor 
suffice for my mother's glory." 

Neither the Empress nor her children could have asked for 
more generous terms than Napoleon volunteered. He pro- 
posed that she should retain her imperial rank as crowned 
Empress, have the Elysee palace in Paris, as well as her cher- 



THE DIVORCE 297 

islied abode at Malmaison and the chateau of Navarre for her 
residences, and receive an allowance of $600,000 a year. 

It was agreed that the divorce should be lawfully pro- 
nounced by mutual consent in a family council in strict ac- 
cordance with the provisions of the Code Napoleon. At nine 
in the evening of December 15, Josephine entered the throne 
room to take part in her last function at the Tuileries. The 
act of divorce was read, and the Empress, drying her eyes, 
rose to read her speech in a voice surprisingly composed. She 
began bravely enough: 

With the permission of our august and dear spouse, I declare 
that, since I have no hope of bearing children who can satisfy the 
requirements of his policy and the interests of France, it is my 
pleasure to give him the greatest proof of attachment and devotion 
which ever was given on earth. 

Now her voice trembled and utterly failed her. As she 
sank weeping into her chair, she handed the paper to a gentle- 
man of the court and dumbly appealed to him to finish the 
speech, which continued: 

I owe all to his bounty. It was his hand which crowned me and, 
seated on his throne, I have received nothing but proofs of affec- 
tion and devotion from the French people. The dissolution of my 
marriage will make no change in the sentiments of my heart. The 
Emperor will always have in me his best friend. I know how much 
this act, which is made necessary by his policy and by such great 
interests, has wounded his heart, but we shall win glory, both of us, 
for the sacrifices we have made for our country. 

After a few minutes the Emperor and Empress met again 
to mingle their tears in a private leave taking, when Josephine 
covered his face with kisses and for the last time he embraced 
the bride of his youth and his glory. Napoleon at once en- 
tered a waiting carriage and drove alone in his gloom through 
the black night to Versailles, there to pass a few days in soli- 
tude at the palace of the Grand Trianon. 

Josephine's departure was deferred until the next after- 
noon. A few courtiers presented themselves in the morning 
to take formal leave of her, but when attended by two mem- 



298 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

bers of the court she entered her carriage for the drive to 
Malmaison, no one came to say good-bye, and she saw not a 
friendly or grateful face as, in a cold and dismal rain, she 
drove away from the Tuileries forever. The palace crowd 
were saving their supple hinges and their fawnings for her 
successor. 

The Emperor rode over to Malmaison the next day to call. 
There he strolled, with Josephine, in the familiar paths of 
the chateau park, but there were no more embraces. When 
he had returned to Versailles he at once sat down and wrote 
her a letter breathing the tenderest anxiety and hastened to 
despatch it by courier in time to reach the Empress before 
she retired for the night. 

The callers at Malmaison all came away with tales of 
Josephine's tears, and, at each distressing report, the Em- 
peror sped a courier to her with a letter appealing to her forti- 
tude. He called again in person on Christmas eve to invite 
her to a Christmas dinner with him at Versailles, and she went 
with Hortense and Eugene. 

Napoleon returned to the Tuileries the day after Christmas. 
He had been away a fortnight and now he was plainly moved 
by the memories the place evoked and shocked to find it so 
desolate without its graceful mistress. "The great palace 
seemed very empty to me," he confessed in his daily letter 
to Josephine. Once more he paid her debts and he appealed 
to her to try to live on $300,000 a year, saving the rest of her 
income for her grandchildren. 

The completion of his policy inaugurated by the divorce 
now occupied Napoleon's attention and he at once pressed 
his plans for a matrimonial alliance with some great reign- 
ing house. A list of the available princesses of Europe lay 
before him like a military map. The widowerhood of the most 
celebrated and powerful man of his time, with the loftiest 
throne in the world at his bestowal, aroused more fear, how- 
ever, than ambition in the bosoms of some of the eligibles. 
Queen Louise, who had only lately returned to Berlin from 
her long exile, thanked God in her maternal heart that her 
first born daughter was dead and safe from the possibility of 



THE DIVORCE 299 

being sacrificed to the conqueror. And the Archduchess 
Marie Louise of Austria wrote to reassure an anxious friend 
that she was in no peril, as her father was too good to think 
of offering her up to the minotaur ! 

Napoleon's own preference was to bind together the two 
empires of France and Russia in a marriage between himself 
and a Romanoff. Alexander, however, was childless, like him- 
self, and had only sisters to be considered. And their mother 
hated the French Emperor. The Czar, caught between his 
importunate ally on one hand and his mother and the entire 
Russian aristocracy on the other, parleyed for time. For two 
months he put off a decisive answer. At last the imperial 
and imperious widower sent an ultimatum, giving the Rus- 
sian court forty-eight hours to say yes or no. Still Alexander 
continued to palter. 

Already the Emperor Francis of Austria had frankly en- 
tered his daughter, Marie Louise, as an open candidate for 
the vacant throne. Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, 
had been camping on the trail of the divorce for two years 
and now that it had come, he prepared to take advantage of it. 

Metternich and the crafty politicians in Vienna had no 
doubt that Napoleon was riding for a fall. They shrewdly 
calculated, however, that the inevitable day of reckoning prob- 
ably was four years off. Meanwhile Austria must keep in his 
good graces until the time came to snatch back the provinces 
he had taken from her. A marriage alliance with him surely 
would stay his hand and at the same time weaken his political 
alliance with Russia, thus hastening his downfall. It was a 
clever, well-thought-out scheme on the part of the Austrian 
court — and it would cost only an eighteen-year-old girl ! 

Weary and exasperated with the Czar's shifty conduct, Na- 
poleon suddenly turned to take up the hint which the Austrian 
government had dropped. For the task of opening the deli- 
cate negotiations, he wished to select the most tactful and 
faithful ambassador in all his Empire. And his choice fell 
upon none other than Josephine, herself ! 

The Empress, as loyal as ever, did not hesitate to accept the 
strange duty. Inviting the wife of Metternich to Malmaison 



300 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

only two weeks after the divorce, she amazed that lady by ex- 
pressing her earnest wish that her divorced husband might 
find consolation in a marriage with Marie Louise. 

When at length in the course of official discussions between 
the two empires, it was plain that Austria was as willing as 
Barkis, Napoleon took a vote on the question in his council of 
state. Marie Louise was elected. Josephine, however, had 
enjoyed the rare honour of making the nomination of her suc- 
cessor in wedlock. 



CHAPTER XXXVI 
THE SECOND MARRIAGE 

1810 AGE 40 

THE world stood astounded when the betrothal of Na- 
poleon and the Archduchess Marie Louise was an- 
nounced in the middle of February, 1810. 

The public had assumed that the Czar's sister was to be 
the new wife of the divorced Emperor. Marie Louise herself, 
with nothing but pity in her heart for the chosen bride of the 
Corsican ogre of her girlish fancy, was innocently watching 
the Frankfurt Gazette for the news of an engagement between 
him and a Russian grand duchess, when toward the end of 
January she was surprised and alarmed to hear that her own 
selection was under consideration. The young Archduchess 
was away from home at the time, but hastened to write to her 
father, the Emperor Francis, imploring him to spare her. 
Meanwhile, Count Metternich, her father's minister of foreign 
affairs and the real matchmaker, was coolly flattering himself 
in a letter to his wife at Paris that "the Archduchess is still 
ignorant, as is proper, of the plans concerning her . . . Our 
princesses are little accustomed to choose their husbands ac- 
cording to their own inclinations." 

Austria was delighted to cut out Russia in that remarkable 
courtship for the hand of the conqueror of Europe. The 
prophetic statesmen of Vienna congratulated themselves that 
they had alienated Napoleon and Alexander — and opened the 
way to the disastrous Russian invasion two years later! At 
least one of Napoleon's own advisers foretold the conse- 
quences. Cambaceres, who insisted that the bridegroom would 
have to fight whichever power he disappointed in the mar- 
riage, favoured the choice of a Russian wife because the Em- 

301 



302 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

peror was " familiar with the road to Vienna but might not 
find the road to St. Petersburg." 

The people of Vienna were not more surprised and startled 
when Napoleon blew up their walls four months before than 
they were by the report that the eldest daughter of their Em- 
peror was to marry the man who had twice seized their city 
and who had lately brought Francis to his feet for the fourth 
time. Only ten months had passed since they saw Marie 
Louise flying before the vanguard of her chosen bridegroom. 
The path of his invading army down the valley of the Danube 
could still be plainly traced by the wreckage left in its wake, 
and across the river from the capital, the charred and bat- 
tered ruins of Aspern, Essling and "Wagram continued to 
bear grim witness to the deadly enmity between him and the 
Hapsburgs. 

Yet the Viennese, quickly recovering from their surprise, 
rejoiced to give the victor an Austrian bride as a hostage to 
peace. "If I had saved the world," Metternich felicitated 
himself, "I could not receive more congratulations or more 
homage." The Austrian national securities rose 30 per cent, 
in two hours after the confirmation of the rumours that 
Austria had bound the giant with ribbons of white. 

The archbishop of Vienna made some slight difficulty about 
a marriage with a divorced person. Napoleon, however, had 
caused a council of French prelates to annul his religious 
marriage to Josephine, which had been solemnized by Cardinal 
Fesch just before the coronation. The annulment was made 
on the grounds that the priest of the parish was not present, 
that the required witnesses were lacking and that the bride- 
groom really had been married without his own consent ! 
According to the custom of the church, the Pope alone could 
decide a question concerning the validity of a sovereign 's mar- 
riage, but the decree of annulment by the Paris tribunal suf- 
ficed to quiet the conscience of the archbishop of Vienna. 

"When at last Metternich pretended to consult Marie Louise 
herself about the marriage, she only asked, "What are my 
father 's wishes ? ' ' From childhood the Archduchess had been 
taught to abhor the French Revolution, which had slain her 



THE SECOND MARRIAGE 303 

beautiful great aunt, Marie Antoinette, the latest archduchess 
that Austria had given to France, and to look upon Napoleon 
as the incarnation of its savagery. He had always been held 
up before her as the outlawed foe of the human race, the 
usurper who had driven from their thrones her grandmother, 
the Queen of Naples ; her uncle, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, 
and her stepmother's father, the Duke of Modena, and who 
had been the unrelenting scourge of her family since she was 
a child. In all her battles with toy soldiers on the nursery 
floor the most villainous among them had unfailingly been 
chosen to represent him and had received from her girlish 
hands the crudest assaults. Now, however, that her father 
bade her throw herself into the arms of the hideous hob- 
goblin of her girlhood, she obediently dismissed' every thought 
that conflicted with her duty as a daughter. 

While she had been well instructed in the classic and mod- 
ern languages and could speak French almost as well as she 
spoke her native German, her thinking faculties had received 
no more training than a well coached parrot's. Her mind 
had been left a clean, white blank, according to the Hapsburg 
rule of rearing a princess, which exalted ignorance into the 
virtue of innocence. Every illusion to forbidden subjects 
had been laboriously cut out of papers and books before the 
modest eyes of Marie Louise were privileged to see them. 
She had dogs and cats, horses and birds and all manner of 
pets, but they were carefully chosen from her own sex, and 
not a male of any species had been permitted to steal into her 
virginal precincts. Her whole world had been thoroughly ex- 
purgated. 

Naturally enough when this prisoner of caste suddenly 
found herself the betrothed of the mightiest ruler of earth and 
destined for the most brilliant of thrones, she began to feel 
a growing interest in her new fortunes as an Empress. She 
frankly enjoyed the humble deference of a court which 
hitherto had ignored her as a child, and her childish vanity 
was excited by the popular interest she aroused, the people 
standing before the palace morning after morning to see her 
on her way to mass. 



304 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The French ambassador to Paris reported, "I must say 
that during the whole hour of my interview Her Imperial 
Highness did not once speak of Paris fashions or theatres ! ' ' 
Metternich, however, thought she ought to improve her ac- 
quaintance with the fashions, for he wrote his wife, "When she 
is properly dressed and put in shape she will do very well. I 
have begged her to engage a dancing master as soon as she 
arrives in Paris and not to dance until she has learned how. ' ' 

The bride and groom never had met and indeed had not so 
much as seen each other's picture. For obvious reasons Na- 
poleon's likeness had not adorned the palace walls of the Haps- 
burgs. Prince Berthier came, however, bringing a miniature 
of him, surrounded by sixteen diamonds and costing $100,000. 

A quickly executed portrait of the bride was despatched to 
Paris in exchange, and as Napoleon devoured it with his 
eyes he exclaimed with delight, ' ' The Hapsburg lip ! The 
Hapsburg lip !" 

That thick under lip was the trade mark of the oldest im- 
perial race of Europe, and the charity pupil of Brienne 
proudly rejoiced in the vanity of its possession. As for the 
rest, Marie Louise's features were undistinguished and plain. 
The Countess Potocka speaks of her "wooden face" and 
"large, pale blue, porcelain eyes." Still it is agreed that her 
tall figure was good; some authorities say it was even beauti- 
ful, and her hair was light chestnut and abundant. 

Two old, drab churches stand neighbours on little side 
streets of Vienna off the Ring and near the Burg, the city 
palace of the Hapsburgs. In one Marie Louise was married ; 
in the other she was buried. They are the beginning and the 
end of her strange story. When, in March, 1810, she stood at 
the altar of the Augustin church to receive from her Uncle 
Charles, as Napoleon's proxy, the ring of the Emperor of the 
French, not a year had yet passed since she and the imperial 
family had knelt at that altar in anxious prayer for the vic- 
tory of Charles over Napoleon. 

When the new Empress of the French arrived at the River 
Inn, the frontier of the kingdom of Bavaria and of the Na- 
poleonic empire, her dowry of $100,000 was counted out and 



THE SECOND MARRIAGE 305 

delivered to the French and she herself was formally checked 
off and transferred like any other consignment. A wooden 
pavilion had been erected on the boundary, and after entering 
it from the Austrian side, Marie Louise passed on to a second 
or neutral chamber in the pavilion. Beyond that room was 
the third or French compartment, where a company of cour- 
tiers from Paris waited to receive their sovereign. In their 
eagerness to see her, they had bored gimlet holes in the par- 
tition between the two rooms, and the prefect of the Tuileries, 
he who had helped three months before to carry the fainting 
Josephine to her apartments, records in his memoirs his peep 
at her. Soon the Austrians knocked at the door for the 
French to come in. They entered to find the Empress seated 
on a throne, and her eyes were filled with tears as she looked 
on her subjects for the first time. 

Marie Louise accompanied her new custodians to a mer- 
chant's house in Braunau, where, following the requirements 
of custom, she divested herself of every garment and adorn- 
ment from her own country, as a symbol of her purpose to 
leave behind her all that was Austrian. An elaborate 
trousseau, including sixty-four dresses, had been made for 
her in Paris at a cost of $80,000, and Napoleon had personally 
inspected it down to its sixty pairs of shoes. 

After two hours' steady work, the Empress was duly ar- 
rayed in the fashions of Paris. The next thing she did was 
to sit down and write her father. Although she protested that 
she was inconsolable except for the reflection that she was 
sacrificing herself for him, she playfully added, "I assure you 
I am already as much perfumed as the French women." 

At Munich the girl bride received a heavy blow. Napoleon 
had ordered that no member of her Austrian suite should 
enter France with her and the one friend who had been per- 
mitted to continue in her company after the parting on the 
Bavarian frontier was now sent back. She was left utterly 
forlorn among strangers, but submitted in silent grief. 

As the Emperor watched for her coming, the cares of em- 
pire were forgotten and he went to the palace of Compiegne 
because it was fifty miles out on the road. The old chateau 



306 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

that sits on its terrace above the valley of the Oise was swiftly 
refurnished and redecorated. Napoleon ordered the installa- 
tion of a system of water works, set up statues in the park and 
began the construction of a broad iron-trellised walk three 
quarters of a mile long in imitation of Marie Louise 's favourite 
arbour at Schonbrunn. He also thoughtfully instructed his 
representatives at Vienna to forward the most cherished of 
her personal belongings. They complied by sending her little 
dog, her bird, and a piece of tapestry which she had left be- 
hind unfinished, and he fondly planned to surprise her with 
them on her arrival. 

At the thought of waiting another day for his affianced 
bride, he burst the bounds of restraint and suddenly shouted, 
"0, ho! O, ho! Constant! Order a carriage without livery 
and come dress me!" Taking with him only King Murat, 
he impulsively dashed off in a March downpour. When the 
postillions of the Empress' coach, who were laboriously 
urging on their horses through the mud and storm, saw the 
Emperor standing out of the rain under the porch of a coun- 
try church they were struck speechless with astonishment. 
An equerry riding beside the coach looked in the direction of 
their startled gaze, and as he saw the drenched monarch run- 
ning toward him he cried, "L'Einpereur !" 

The coach step was quickly lowered and in another moment 
the Emperor had his arms around the neck of Marie Louise. 
Then he made the highly important statement, "You are 
surely not afraid of mud!" Marie Louise made the far more 
significant observation, "Why, you are much better looking 
than your picture!" 

Late in a stormy evening the soaking postillions and much 
bespattered coach drew up at the foot of the steps of the palace 
of Compiegne. After getting rid of the inevitable ceremonies 
there in short order, the Empress retired to her apartments, 
where she was soon joined by the Emperor. He had intended 
to lodge under another roof, but on consulting both legal and 
religious advisers, he received the welcome assurance that the 
marriage by proxy was a marriage in fact, as had been de- 
termined in the instance of Henry IV and Marie de Medici. 



THE SECOND MARRIAGE 307 

In the Gallery of Apollo at St. Cloud, where Napoleon first 
seized the reins of power and where he was first acclaimed 
Emperor, his union with the daughter of the Hapsburgs was 
confirmed by a civil marriage, after which a grand entry into 
Paris w T as made for the purpose of another religious mar- 
riage, but this time not by proxy. 

The Emperor and the Empress entered the city under the 
unfinished Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile, to which 5000 work- 
men had hastily given the appearance of completion by the 
use of wood and canvas. Marie Louise sat in the gilded cor- 
onation coach where Josephine had sat only a little more than 
five years before, and wore the crown of diamonds that had 
sparkled on the brow of her Creole predecessor. But a more 
disquieting suggestion than that was presented as she drove 
across the Place de la Concorde, where her great-aunt, Marie 
Antoinette, had died on the scaffold sixteen years before, a 
suggestion that might have awakened bitter memories in a 
person having a livelier imagination. 

The beautiful Salon Carre of the Louvre, from whose walls 
Mona Lisa smiles her inscrutable smile and the immortal 
creations of Raphael, Titian and the masters look down upon 
the wondering visitors, had been converted into a chapel for 
the third marriage ceremony. On velvet cushioned benches 
the full length of the Grand Gallery opening out of that im- 
provised chapel, 4000 women sat, and behind them in double 
rows stood 4000 men, while Napoleon enthroned his young 
bride beside him and the nuptial benediction was pronounced 
by the Cardinal Grand Almoner of France — Uncle Fesch ! 

The dethroned Josephine viewed from her melancholy re- 
treat the Emperor's new domestic relations. Although she 
was as near as Malmaison, she wrote assuring him, 

I shall live here as if I were 1000 leagues from Paris. I have 
made a great sacrifice, Sire, and every day I feel more and more 
the full extent of it. . . . It will be a complete one as far as I am 
concerned. Your Majesty shall not be troubled in your happiness 
by any expression of my regret. I shall pray incessantly that Your 
Majesty may be happy, perhaps I may even pray that I may see 
you again. But let Your Majesty be assured I shall always respect 



308 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

the new situation in which Your Majesty finds yourself, and respect 
it in silence. 

It was indeed a strange and difficult part the divorced Em- 
press was called upon to play, but she effaced herself as suc- 
cessfully as in other days she had borne the fierce and search- 
ing light that beats upon a throne. Neither Josephine nor 
Napoleon in their separation ever gave the least occasion for 
evil gossip, although the first recorded tears of Marie Louise 
in France were shed one day when the Emperor had gone to 
call on her predecessor. Those tears only signify, however, 
that she had come to care enough for her husband to cry 
over him. 

Marie Louise was not troubled to find that in her marriage 
she had only exchanged palace prisons and that a husband 
instead of her father had become her warder. Asleep or 
awake, she was hemmed in by a guard of ladies in waiting 
and women attendants and never was permitted to be alone 
in the presence of a man. 

The Emperor paraded his captive in imperial progresses 
to various parts of France and she insisted on going with 
him everywhere. After the marriage formalities in Paris 
they had returned to Compiegne, and that palace remains 
the most distinct souvenir of Marie Louise. No confusing 
recollections of Josephine cling to its leafy park and stately 
halls, for she seldom if ever stayed there. On the visitors' 
register French citizens of many minds have scrawled their 
expressions of the emotions aroused by the place: "Vive 
l'Empereur!" "Vive le Roi de Rome!" "Vive le Prince 
Victor et la Princesse Clementine!" "Marie Louise, in- 
grate, who could not comprehend an incomparable genius ! ' ' 
"Poor little harp of l'Aiglon!" "Vive la Republique— 
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite!" "How times have changed!" 

As the official shepherd herds his tourist flock over the foot- 
wearying parquetry of the palace, his mumbled story is of 
the bridal chamber of Marie Louise and her now tubless bath- 
room; of her music room, the piano Napoleon gave her; the 
diminutive harp of the King of Rome, and his childish chair 
sitting pathetically before it as if the little boy purple had 



THE SECOND MARRIAGE 309 

only just run out to romp on the grassy bank of the lake. 
The camp dining table of Napoleon is also among the exhibits, 
an ingenious contrivance which might accommodate a large 
company of guests when spread, but which when folded half a 
dozen times could almost be carried under the arm. 

The bed on which Marie Antoinette slept the first night she 
passed under a Bourbon roof, and the bed of the Empress 
Eugenie link those unfortunate sovereigns with Marie Louise, 
while the statue of Joan of Arc down in the village square 
recalls that it was there the maid was arrested. Compiegne 
thus presents a strange, sad quartet of women. 

In the garden of the palace is a stone seat, which is known 
as Napoleon 's bench, since there the eagle often perched in the 
rapturous days of his wedded joys and the full meridian of 
his glory. Yet only four years after those April dreams and 
April hopes on the garden bench at Compiegne, alien troops 
burst into that very park and the terrace ran with the blood 
of Frenchmen defending the honeymoon chateau of Napoleon 
and Marie Louise from the assaults of Russia, Austria, and all 
Europe banded against the son-in-law of the Hapsburgs. 



CHAPTER XXXVII 

THE KING OF ROME 

1811 AGE 41 

THE world paused to listen as the stork hovered above 
the palace home of Napoleon and Marie Louise in the 
early spring of 1811. If it should be only a girl, 
twenty-one guns were to be fired, but if a boy, 101 thunderous 
salvos were to proclaim the birth of an heir to the sovereignty 
of the earth. 

In the Tuileries, two gorgeous little cribs stood side by side, 
one pink, the other blue. Nearby them rose the gift of the 
city of Paris, a magnificent cradle, designed by the famous 
artist, Prudhon. It was inlaid with mother of pearl and 
golden bees, and at its head a winged figure of Glory held a 
crown high above the pillow, while a young eagle perched at 
the foot with wings outspread ready for flight. A great heap 
of lacy, tiny garments had been made at a cost of $60,000, 
and a governess from the highest nobility was in readiness to 
take her appointed place of honour in the imperial nursery. 

When a year had passed since Marie Louise made her entry 
into the Empire, the monstrous clapper of the great bell in 
the south tower of Notre Dame sounded a summons to the 
devout, which was chimed by all the church bells of Paris, 
calling upon the people to give the night over to prayer for 
the Empress. Early in the morning while the Emperor was 
resorting to his customary remedy for strained nerves in a 
steaming bath, Dr. Dubois, the foremost maternity specialist 
of Paris, excitedly burst in upon him to say that the event 
was at hand, and that he feared either the mother or the 
child must be sacrificed. 

Napoleon always was true in his simpler moments. In the 

310 



THE KING OF ROME 311 

presence of the problem presented to him by the physician, 
the monarch and his dynastic ambitions gave way to the man 
and the husband. "Come! Come! M. Dubois!" he ex- 
claimed. "Do not lose your head! AVhat would you do in 
the same circumstances if you were attending the wife of a 
citizen ? Do just as you would if you were in the house of a 
tradesman in the Rue St. Denis. Be careful of the mother 
and the child, but if you cannot save both, save the mother 
for me. "Whatever happens consider her first." 

It was not far from nine o'clock in the morning when a 
nine pound child entered the world which was to be his birth- 
right. But the little eagle was silent, blue, and apparently 
lifeless and Napoleon no more than glanced at the tiny figure 
as it lay neglected on the floor. Only when the Empress had 
rallied, did the governess turn to the all-but-forgotten and 
supposedly dead child. Forcing between its dumb lips a drop 
of brandy, she slapped its still body and wrapped it in hot 
cloths. 

It was seven minutes after the birth when a faint cry 
startled the company. At that feeble wail, a wild joy leaped 
into the heart of Napoleon, and he bent over the inheritor of 
his throne, the perpetuator of his dynasty, the King of Rome ! 

Paris and France and all the subject nations still waited 
and watched for the news until the signal battery of the 
Hotel des Invalides began to boom. The city stopped and 
hearkened ; the people in the streets stood still ; the trades- 
men in the shops came to their doors ; the women in the homes 
opened their windows. When they had counted twenty-one, 
it seemed as if the salute had ceased, so tense was the curiosity, 
so impatient were the counters with the pause. As another 
salvo rolled over the city, however, the roar of the guns was 
drowned in the cheers of the people. 

Mine. Blanchard sailed away in a balloon to scatter printed 
bulletins in her path and carry the tidings beyond the rever- 
berations of the cannon. The semaphore telegraph flashed 
the message through the sunshine that suffused the natal 
day, and by noon the cheers were rolling over the Empire 
from Lyons to Antwerp, from Brest to Strasburg. 



312 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

A courier raced to Vienna with a jubilant note from the 
father to the grandfather, and another sped to the chateau 
of Navarre, where the next day the door of Josephine's apart- 
ment was noisily thrown open by an usher, who cried, "A 
message from the Emperor!" The divorced Empress read: 
"My son is a big, healthy boy. He has my chest, my mouth, 
my eyes. I hope he will fulfil his destiny. ' ' 

Josephine disclosed no twinge of envy, but said to a friend 
in simple sincerity, "I am happy to see that the sacrifice I 
have made for France has been of use, and that the country's 
future is assured. How happy the Emperor must be ! " 
Alas, the gift her intuition had chosen was a pin for a girl 
baby ! One day she was to receive a clandestine visit from 
the child in the little chateau of Bagatelle, at the edge of the 
Bois de Boulogne, and press to her bosom the son of Na- 
poleon. 

Marie Louise enjoyed a speedy convalescence, leaving her 
bed when the baby was but seventeen days old, and appearing 
before the public on the terrace in the garden ten days later. 
The infant was nursed for fourteen months at the breast of 
the wife of a palace mechanic, and the maternal instinct seems 
never to have been very deeply aroused in the girl mother. 

Probably the little fellow w r as oftener in the arms of his 
father than of his mother. The Emperor proudly took him 
to the palace windows to show him to the people, and he pre- 
sented him before the imperial guard to receive his first salute. 

The baptism took place at Notre Dame in June, when the 
father carried his child from the font to the porch of the 
great cathedral and held him up before the thousands who 
crowded the open space. It was the last time that Napoleon 
and Paris were to rejoice together. Feasts were spread in 
the squares and the beautiful capital gleamed at night like a 
gem-studded crown. 

Princes of the Empire swarmed the city and deputations 
came from all Europe to see the heir of the master of mankind 
christened Napoleon Francis Joseph Charles and formally in- 
vested with the proudest of titles, the King of Rome. In the 
Eternal City itself, the capitol and the coliseum, the ancient 



THE KING OF ROME 313 

arches and columns, the dome of St. Peter's and the castle of 
St. Angelo blazed with illuminations that lit up the seven hills, 
and Napoleon decreed that the successors to his throne should 
always be twice crowned, at a Roman as well as a Parisian 
coronation. 

The Emperor followed the pompous ceremony at Notre 
Dame with a great fete for the populace at St. Cloud. Three 
hundred thousand people feasted and sported in the lovely 
park of that chateau, where, in the evening, the noble outlines 
of the palace of the King of Rome at Chaillot, which the 
architects already had designed, were traced in fire, while the 
flaming crown of the child floated in the sky, where it had 
been discharged from a great balloon. Alas, that palace at 
Chaillot was no more than a castle in the air, for neither 
crowns nor palaces was the King of Rome to possess. 

A favourite playtime, when the infant king had passed into 
childhood, was at the Emperor's breakfast, when he liked to 
hold his boy on his knee, perhaps dipping his own fingers 
into some sauce and smearing the little face with it. In 
another scene that grew familiar to the court, the Emperor 
seated on his sofa, studied state papers with the child beside 
him, or, holding him in his lap, he sat at his desk scratching 
his signature on orders and decrees for Europe to obey. 
When his infantile majesty tore to pieces a guardsman's plume 
one day while the veteran was holding him, Duroc told the 
soldier to let the Prince have his fun and he gave him an order 
for two plumes to take its place. 

The governess, Mine, de Montesquieu — ' ' Mamma Que ' ' — did 
not humour the King in his naughtiness. When she thought 
he was old enough to know better, she found a way to bring 
him out of a spasm of screaming rage. She simply closed all 
the windows, and as the yelling urchin lying on the floor saw 
her closing them, his curiosity was aroused. "I did it," the 
governess soberly explained, "so that the people would not 
hear you. For the French never would have a king who be- 
haved so badly as you have been behaving." 

The governess, however, was alarmed many times by the 
seemingly careless and sometimes rough manner in which the 



314 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

eagle played with his tender fledgeling. He tossed him about, 
boisterously rolled on the floor with him, weighted him down 
with a big sword strapped around him, gave him things to 
eat that upset his stomach, and as the decorous daughter of 
the Hapsburgs wrote her father, was "very childish about 
him." If the child cried when he made awful faces at him, 
the Emperor rebuked him. "What! A king and crying! 
Fie ! Fie ! ' ' Once at least he spanked him in the presence 
of Talma, the tragedian, but only for the "fun of spanking a 
king. ' ' 

As the Russian war clouds lowered, the Emperor had wooden 
blocks of many kinds and colours made, representing the units 
of an army, and these he carefully arranged and moved about 
in various experimental operations. If the boy chanced to 
see his father lying on the floor apparently playing with those 
pretty toys he naturally insisted on taking a hand in the game. 
Although he inevitably brought confusion upon the thought- 
fully projected manoeuvres in which the Great Captain was en- 
gaged, he never was reprimanded or incurred the penalty of 
a frown. 

Out at Rambouillet there stands, on the border of the 
chateau park, the only palace the fond father before hastening 
to his fall erected for his son, and it is still known as "le 
Palais du Roi de Rome." Although the structure is the size 
of a comfortable three-story dwelling, it was meant only as 
a playhouse for the little King, where from a mimic throne 
he could hold his childish court and amuse himself with re- 
hearsals of the part for which his father had cast him in the 
drama of life when he should be the lord of the palaces of 
Europe. 

In the shady depths of the park at Rambouillet lies the very 
rock on which all the hopes of father and son were wrecked. 
For on that smooth-topped stone under the trees, Napoleon 
spread his maps in May of 1811, and planned the fatal Rus- 
sian campaign of the following year. And alongside the wall 
of the park ran and runs the highway to Chartres, to Roche- 
fort and on to St. Helena ! 

It well may have been then and there, by that rock in the 



THE KING OF ROME 315 

forest of Rambouillet, as he looked up from his map to see 
the two months' old King reclining in his baby carriage, that 
Napoleon gave the sigh echoed by history, "Poor child! 
"What a snarl I shall leave to you!" But fortune held the 
skein and the great fatalist was helpless to unravel her 
tangled web. 

That the birth of the King of Rome, and the realisation of 
his father's longing for a successor to perpetuate his dynasty, 
should definitely mark the beginning of the end of the Em- 
pire is among the ironies and paradoxes of history. But 
it all nicely fits into the logic of events. For with the com- 
ing of the baby, Napoleon viewed the completion of his plan 
of disconnecting his Empire from its orginal source of 
power, the democracy, and of connecting it with another 
source, the old principle of legitimacy and rule by right divine. 

The French looked on, without enthusiasm and with many 
chilling misgivings, at each successive step he had taken away 
from them and back toward the institutions overthrown in the 
Revolution. When he put away his wife, a daughter of 
France, he wounded the domestic sentiment of the nation and 
weakened the chain that bound the people to his monarchy. 
In his alliance with the Hapsburgs at his marriage with Marie 
Louise, the people saw the dissolution of his alliance with 
them and they awakened to the regret that he had not only di- 
vorced himself from Josephine, but from them as well. 

The Emperor remained constant to the Republic only in 
his apparel. Although he had abolished its name and covered 
the French people with the gold braid of his imperial livery, 
he reserved for himself the privilege of dressing in the re- 
publican simplicity of the Revolution. He had only two 
styles of clothing, a blue coat for Sundays, and for every-day 
wear a green coat with a single row of white buttons, a white 
waistcoat, and a fresh pair of white knee breeches daily — be- 
cause he would wipe his quill on them — and silk stockings 
with gold buckles on his shoes. On his shoulders, he wore the 
modest epaulets of a mere colonel, and on his breast a silver 
decoration of the Legion of Honour, with the grand cordon 
of the order beneath his coat. His cravat was always black. 



316 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

When he was complaining, "I have more crowns than I 
know what to do with," he still wore no other hat than the 
black three-cornered chapeau of revolutionary days with its 
tricolour cockade. Sober as that headgear was, he was par- 
ticular about its condition and quality, buying as many as a 
score of hats in a year — they are scattered throughout the 
museums of Europe — and paying $12 each for them. More- 
over, Constant always had to break them in by wearing them 
for several days before they adorned the imperial head. 

Enamelled snuff boxes were another of Napoleon's few ex- 
travagances. He never smoked, and he took snuff rather as 
a nervous habit than to satisfy any craving for nicotine, shak- 
ing far more of the powder on the floor or ground than he ever 
inhaled. Cologne was still another of his indulgences. His 
handkerchief was saturated with it. His hair reeked with 
it. He bathed in it and a bottle of it was poured over his 
shoulders every morning. 

The man was not a despot from vanity so much as from a 
redundance of the power of mastery, with which his nature 
was endowed. He protested in all good faith that he was not 
over-ambitious. He was like a giant forest king which, with 
its far-running roots and wide-spreading branches, dwarfs its 
companions. 

Every franc spent in France, in Italy, in Belgium, and in 
his widely scattered possessions must have the Emperor's own 
approval. "I keep the key of the treasury always in my 
pocket," he said. He trusted no subordinates. 

Every movement of a regiment among his million troops, 
every appointment of a second-class clerk must have his sanc- 
tion, and he took unto himself the choice of all the municipal 
councillors of France. As Taine said, ' ' My armies, my fleets, 
my councils, my senate, my populations, my Empire," had 
come to be Napoleon's proprietary tone. For awhile he kept 
the name of the Republic in the Empire, but since 1807 he had 
boldly proclaimed himself "Napoleon by the grace of God and 
the constitution, Emperor of the French, King of Italy and 
Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine." 

Duroc impatiently chided Dumas, "You always commit the 



THE KING OF ROME 317 

same fault; you will answer the Emperor." Yet Gohier says, 
' ' It was the one who had vexed him most in a debate whom he 
generally asked to dinner." And Caulaincourt, whose 
candour the Emperor admired, and trusted, testified: "Once 
the first irritation was past, he generously forgave offences." 
General Rapp, the blunt Alsatian, never ceased to speak his 
mind to the Emperor or to command his regard. "How do 
your Germans like these little napoleons?" the Emperor asked 
one day, as he was examining a new vintage of twenty franc 
gold pieces. "Better than the great one, sire," the soldier 
frankly replied. 

The Emperor brooked the most gross insult from Talley- 
rand. He came back from Spain to learn of more plotting 
on the part of his grand chamberlain, and he fell upon him 
furiously. When the imperial storm had spent itself, Talley- 
rand turned to the watching courtiers and coldly observed, 
"Is it not a pity that so great a man should have been so 
poorly brought up ! " 

In the nature of things, a despotism never relaxes, but al- 
ways tends to become more and more astringent, since it de- 
stroys independence and initiative. In camp and court alike, 
the servitors of Napoleon ceased to argue with him, correct 
his mistakes or even to address him, except to reply to his 
questions. 

The nations stood hushed in the presence of his towering 
might. As many as thirty persons were forbidden to assemble 
anywhere in France without a license, and no book was per- 
mitted to be put on sale until it had been in the hands of 
the police seven days. 

Although the Emperor had suppressed all but eight news- 
papers in Paris, whose combined circulation was only 18,632 
copies, the few survivors continued to annoy him. Even 
while he revised them with his sword, he complained that 
"the newspapers are extremely badly edited." He scorn- 
fully held the journalist to be "a grumbler, a censurer, a giver 
of advice, a regent of sovereigns, a tutor of nations. Four 
newspapers are more dangerous than 100,000 soldiers in 
arms." 



318 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Already the Emperor, who had left home at nine and been 
a man ever since, was yawning, ' ' The world is very old, ' ' and 
was vetoing experiments. ' ' Old practices are worth more than 
new theories," he said. Yet it was only a dozen years since 
he burst upon Europe and overwhelmed her with the power 
of a new idea. 

In an autocracy the state ages with the autocrat. Napoleon 
and his marshals and ministers were aging fast. By reason 
of the pace they had gone they were prematurely old. The 
Emperor, calculating that they would all be fifty at the same 
time, lamented to his council of state that younger men could 
never fill their shoes. "Tiny were all children of the Revolu- 
tion," he said, "tempered in its waters, and they rose from 
them with a vigour that will not be repeated." 

The lean and hungry Little Corporal, with his wagon 
hitched to his star and dashing forth to meet victory, had now 
left the stage to the sated and corpulent Emperor, who was 
only fully aroused at the approach of adversity. His ar- 
teries were the Empire's as well, and they hardened to- 
gether. "The luxuries of royalty," he confessed, "proved 
a heavy charge." As his paunch developed, the body politic 
became obese and his increasing sluggishness was communi- 
cated to the extremities of his realm. 

His work was done or as nearly so as he could do it. He 
had carried the Revolution to the borders of Russia. He had 
swept aside the rubbish of the Middle Ages and opened the 
way for a new era. He had struck feudalism dead beyond 
resurrection and crippled class privilege beyond repair. 
Even in setting up a throne for himself, he had disclosed, as 
he said, that thrones are "only a few deal planks" and thus 
he had stripped kingcraft of its divinity forever. 

The man was the victim of his own success, the sport of his 
genius. Each triumph of his arms was but a temptation to 
seek another. The birth of an heir only inflamed his ambition 
to enlarge the child 's heritage. 

His estate already stretched northward from the Medi- 
terranean to the Baltic, and eastward from the Bay of Bis- 
cay to the Ionian Sea, with vassal kings and allied sovereigns 



THE KING OF ROME 319 

standing like sentries at the outposts of his broad dominions. 
Every sword, every musket between Madrid and Warsaw was 
at his command. 

He had eclipsed the mighty empires of the Assyrians, the 
Babylonians and the Persians, of Alexander, Caesar and 
Charlemagne. Now at last he had the happy promise that 
his sceptre should pass to no unlineal hand. His blood, min- 
gled with that of the Caesars, should inherit a wider rule than 
ever was bequeathed before. Still he was not without a warn- 
ing premonition. "It will last as long as I last," he said. 
"After that, my son may deem himself fortunate if he has 
$8000 a year." 

Yet he could not stop. "I must always be going," he said. 
He must ever go on building higher and higher on the ever 
narrowing foundation of his own personal despotism. 



CHAPTER XXXVIII 
A WORLD AT WAR 

1809-1812 AGE 39-42 

ON the eve of Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia 
in 1812, John Quincy Adams, the American minister 
at Petrograd, was discussing the impending conflict, 
when a high official at the court of the Czar charged it to 
" Women, women, women!" They were responsible, the 
American minister was assured, for all the recent wars that 
had convulsed Europe. Queen Louise had fanned the flames of 
the Franco-Prussian War in 1806. The Empress Marie of 
Austria had stirred up the strife that led to the Wagram 
campaign in 1S09. Now a Russian Grand Duchess had 
brought Russia and France to swords' points. 

While the Europe of 1812 was no garden of Eden into 
which it remained for a daughter of Eve to introduce the 
serpent of strife, there was enough truth in the remark, which 
Adams quotes in his diary, to lend a faint colour to its ex- 
aggeration and to make the sister of the Czar Alexander a 
figure in the story of that tragic year. She was the wife of 
the Duke of Oldenburg, and Napoleon having found the 
dreary dunes of the tiny duchy of Oldenburg in his way, had 
annexed to his empire that mere handful of German sand 
by the North Sea. The Duchess thereupon returned to Rus- 
sia, carrying her bitter grievance with her, and the Dowager 
Czarina and the Czar took up her quarrel. 

No one knew better than John Quincy Adams, however, that 
the fleets of Yankee schooners which haunted the fogs of the 
Baltic, bidding defiance to the British blockade of the sea and 
the French blockade of the land, were a more serious cause 
of estrangement between Napoleon and Alexander than the 

320 



A WORLD AT AVAR 321 

annexation of Oldenburg. Xo doubt an immense amount of 
British freight was being dumped at Russian ports, mostly 
by American ships, to be distributed thence over Europe. But 
while Alexander continued to exclude British vessels, he 
declined to shut out those from the United States and other 
neutral nations. The Czar not only refused to comply with 
the commands of the French Emperor, but he also boldly 
challenged him by prohibiting the entry into Russia of mam- 
French manufactures, on the ground that the wealth of his 
empire was being drained to pay for Parisian luxuries. And 
as he defied him, he marshalled his military forces near the 
frontier. 

The sharp bowsprit of the Xew England schooner thus was 
the entering wedge that pried apart the Emperor of the east 
and the Emperor of the west, and the young Republic of the 
New World was a factor in bringing to an end the great trade 
war between France and England, which began with Napo- 
leon's secret purchase and then his hasty sacrifice of Louisiana. 
For nine years the ruler of the land had striven with the 
ruler of the sea, England struggling to shut the highways of 
the ocean and Napoleon the gateways of the European con- 
tinent. First and last both had been baffled by the daring and 
enterprising Yankee skipper more than by any other element 
in their problem. 

To shut out the wares of British manufacturers and the 
products of British colonies, Napoleon had marched his army 
from the harbour of Lisbon to the banks of the Niemen. He 
had gathered all the nations of the continent beneath his 
sword in a continental union against his island foe, and had 
erected a wall of China around Europe. 

Even the bayonets of a million soldiers, however, could not 
close the immemorial avenues of trade, nor could Napoleon's 
big broom sweep back the natural currents of commerce. The 
war between England and France prostrated the honest busi- 
ness of the continent and of the British Isles and brought on 
an epidemic of bankruptcy, but the ruined merchants were 
replaced by 100,000 smugglers, who matched their wits against 
an army of customs officials. 



322 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

When at last the Emperor found he could not stop smug- 
gling, he adopted a system of licensing it and sharing in its 
profits by taking 50 per cent, of the value of certain kinds 
of imports offered for sale. All other smuggled goods were 
confiscated and sold at great auctions. But he excepted from 
the auction the British woollen and cottons that his agents had 
seized. These were piled in heaps and destroyed in huge 
bonfires that lit up the Empire. All letters written in Eng- 
lish or captured in transit between the continent and the 
British Isles also were burned, as many as 100,000 being con- 
signed to the flames on an appointed day. 

Every nation, and indeed every household, felt the burden 
of the continental system. It set the Empire at war with the 
church itself, although the Petrograd official well might have 
blamed a woman for that quarrel, and an American woman. 
For Betsy Paterson really was at the bottom of the unhappy 
conflict between Rome and its eldest daughter. 

It was not until the Emperor asked that Jerome Bona- 
parte's American marriage be annulled that the first open 
breach occurred. The ecclesiastical authorities found, on in- 
vestigation, that the ceremony had not been performed in 
strict conformity with a decree of the Council of Trent, but 
it was also found that this latter decree never had been pub- 
lished at Baltimore and consequently had no force in that 
diocese. Pope Pius VII replied to the Emperor, therefore, 
that the marriage was valid and that he was powerless to 
gratify his wish. 

It may easily be imagined with how little patience Napoleon 
saw his purpose balked. Thenceforth his relations with the 
Pope rapidly went from bad to worse. At last he locked up 
Pius VII, a mild, unaggressive man who was sixty-seven when 
his captivity began, cut him off from his cardinals and coun- 
sellors, from theological books and papers, and from all com- 
munication with the church. The captive 's isolation was com- 
pleted by the silence of the press, which was forbidden to 
allude to his arrest or his whereabouts. 

The Pontiff bore his immurement with becoming resignation. 
"When, however, he was required to surrender even the ring 



A WORLD AT WAR 323 

of the Fisherman, he had the spirit to break it in two before 
handing it to the imperial official. Moreover, he established 
a continental blockade of his own against Napoleon. By his 
refusal to confirm bishops for the Empire, many sees became 
vacant, and the machinery of the church throughout the im- 
perial dominions was thrown into a vexatious confusion. 
For even though he was in prison, he still was the "Keeper 
of the Keys." 

Traditionally and instinctively Napoleon was a Catholic. 
For instance, in the presence of danger or upon the discovery 
of some important fact, it was his habit to make the sign of 
the cross ; but his imperious will refused to submit itself to the 
authority of the church and he persistently declined to go to 
communion. When Marie Louise came to Paris, she asked 
the archbishop if it would be proper for her to receive that 
sacrament. The prelate excused her since her presence at 
communion might only emphasise her husband's absence and 
occasion unpleasant remarks. 

Neither woman nor religion really was responsible for the 
bitter struggle between the Emperor and the Pope. Its true 
underlying causes were cotton and calicoes, coffee and sugar, 
rice, tobacco and indigo. Even Napoleon's own brother, the 
King of Holland, rebelled against the blockade. At last, 
when 20,000 imperial troops were marching on Amsterdam for 
the purpose of more effectually closing the ports of the coun- 
try, Louis flung away his crown and fled to Bohemia. The 
Emperor thereupon annexed Holland to France. With 
Oldenburg and Bremen, Hamburg and the shore beyond, the 
Empire now stretched to the boundary of Denmark. 

If a brother was the first, a marshal of Napoleon's was 
the second ally to desert him. The King of Sweden being 
without an heir, some Swedes proposed that Marshal Berna- 
dotte should be adopted as the successor to their throne. 
Bernadotte was a brother-in-law of Joseph Bonaparte; his 
son Oscar was the god-son of Napoleon, and the Swedish au- 
thorities innocently supposed that the selection would be 
highly pleasing to the Emperor. 

The proposal placed Napoleon in a predicament. He had 



324 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

every reason to distrust the loyalty of Bernadotte. Still if 
he consented to his elevation, the marshal's wife, Desiree 
Clary, would get a crown at last. Wherefore, he said to the 
candidate, "Go, and let our destinies be accomplished." 
The ex-sergeant of marines went forth, therefore, with 
the Emperor's blessing and a large gift of money besides, to 
found a royal house which should long outlast that of the 
Bonapartes. 

Russia having lately taken Finland from Sweden, the new 
crown prince began a campaign to repair that loss. He 
proposed to take Norway from the crown of Denmark, but 
Napoleon would not consent to any attack on his Danish ally. 
He suggested instead that if Sweden joined him against Russia 
he would help her to recover Finland. The Emperor, how- 
ever, in his purpose to close tighter the ports of the Baltic to 
British goods, took Swedish Pomerania, thereby giving mortal 
offence to the Swedes and their crown prince. 

The continental system had now openly embroiled Napoleon 
with the Pope, the Czar, the Swedes and with his brother 
Louis, while it had done more than all else to embitter the 
various peoples of Europe against him. Its entire structure, 
which for years he had been laboriously rearing, was rocking 
on its foundations and threatening to bury him and his throne 
beneath its wreckage. 

The Empire was not menaced at home, but from abroad. 
The people within its wide-flung borders dwelt in peace if 
not in prosperity. They never gave the Emperor a moment 
of uneasiness while he sat on the throne and they never for- 
sook him as long as he held aloft a standard. For fifteen 
years his great realm remained as tranquil within as England 
or the United States. 

Nor did he hold his people in subjection with his sword. 
Under the orders of the incompetent and corrupt Directory 
he had turned his guns on a rebellious population at the steps 
of the Church of St. Roch, in 1795, but from the day of his 
own rise to power to the day of his downfall he never pointed 
a cannon except at alien foes. He ruled by the force of jus- 
tice and wisdom and the vanity of glory. Victor Hugo once 



A WORLD AT WAR 325 

said that the two greatest things of the nineteenth century 
were Napoleon and liberty. As long as France had the 
former it was content without the latter. 

While the lands incorporated in the Empire remained quiet, 
discontent rose and spread among the people of the allied 
states, which Napoleon had subjugated without annexing. 
In the days when kings and grand dukes were taking orders 
like field hands from their overseer at Paris, when the Prus- 
sian monarch was limiting his army to the number specified 
and dismissing patriot ministers, when the Austrian Emperor 
was giving his daughter in marriage to the conqueror, book- 
sellers like John Palm, gooseherds like Gneisenau, cowherds 
like Scharnhorst, tavern keepers like Andreas Hofer, simple 
souls like the maid of Saragossa w r ere lifting from the dust the 
standards of their countries. 

In the course of the long struggle Napoleon had changed his 
base. He was not fighting for a republic now but for a crown. 
He was not pulling down thrones but setting them up. Kings 
had become his allies and the people had fallen away from 
him. He was fighting for the past, not for the future. He 
was looking backward, not forward, and his moral retreat 
began before his military retreat. 

He himself once computed that the moral force in war is as 
three to one in comparison with the physical. Thus did he 
mathematically verify Shakespeare's line, 

Thrice is he armed that hath his quarrel just. 

By that measure, Napoleon lost two-thirds of his strength 
when he ceased to be the champion of freedom and progress, 
and became an invader and conqueror. As the moral force 
passed from his ranks into the ranks of the enemy, he sub- 
stituted batteries for it, his infantry having lost its old-time 
dash. His soldiers had taken Italy with their bare hands, 
but Wagram was distinctly an artillery success. ' ' The poorer 
the troops," he said, "the more artillery they need." 

Now he must win with lead where once he won with hearts 
and must hurl cannon balls at the lines of the foe which in 
other times he had pierced with bayonets. 



326 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

As his army lost its patriotic fervor, his princely and ducal 
generals lost their martial ardour. They had won their batons 
and their glory fighting for France. They were chary of 
risking their laurels with degenerate troops in campaigns 
that did not awaken any national enthusiasm. In their ple- 
beian youth, moreover, they had no other roof for their heads 
than where they nightly pitched their tents and no other place 
to go than war. But now they sighed for their ducal parks 
and marble halls with trains attendant. The generous rivalry 
of young hopes and ambitions had given way to the arrogant 
pride and bitter jealousies of rank and wealth. 

The army, the aristocracy, the whole Empire had lost the 
inspiring illusions of youth. They had all gone stale when 
the Emperor accepted the challenge of the Czar and, like an- 
other Titanic rushing upon an iceberg, hurled himself against 
the Russian Empire. 

His independent and honest counsellors were powerless to 
arrest him. In vain the economists argued that Russia had 
nothing for France to take. In vain the financiers pleaded 
that the finances of the Empire needed peace. 

With the Spanish revolution unsubdued and all the peoples 
about his Empire ready to emulate the Spaniards, he yet held 
to his course. He himself had already foretold his fate when 
he said, "I shall see the gulf open before me some day, but I 
shall not be able to stop myself. I shall climb so high that 
I shall turn giddy." 

No longer could a warning voice make itself heard. His 
reasoning often was darkly mystical and fatalistic. He spoke 
in 1811 of an ''impulsion" which was driving France and 
Russia into war. "I feel myself impelled toward a goal 
with which I am unacquainted," he said as if in a trance. 
"When I shall have reached it, when I shall be no longer 
needed for it, an atom will suffice to overthrow me, but until 
that moment, all efforts will be powerless against me." 

Cardinal Fesch implored him not to fly in the face of men, 
the elements, religion, earth, and Heaven or he would sink 
under the combined weight of their enmity. His only reply 
was to lead his uncle to a window and point to a star of 



A WORLD AT WAR 327 

destiny, visible only to his own eyes. One of his ministers 
shook his head and sighed, ' ' The Emperor is mad, completely 
mad, and will destroy us all. This will all end in a terrible 
crash ! ' ' 

Still the reasons for the war were not by any means wholly 
occult. Napoleon had been trying for nearly a decade to 
conquer the power of England on the sea by closing against 
her trade the harbours of Europe. If one remained open none 
would remain closed. If Russia were permitted to break the 
blockade, no other nation could be asked to maintain it and 
it would be only a matter of months until the Czar would be 
able to form a new coalition against France. 

Two inveterate enemies of Napoleon had entered the coun- 
sels of the Czar and were industriously strengthening his arm 
against the French Emperor. One of them was Stein, the 
Prussian cabinet minister, whom the Emperor had ordered 
the King of Prussia to dismiss. The other was that Corsican 
rival of Napoleon's youth, Pozzo di Borgo. 

Napoleon and Pozzo had left Ajaccio together, the one to 
conquer Europe, the other to wander from capital to capital 
in his bitter, unceasing efforts to thwart him. For twenty 
years the two Corsicans carried on their relentless vendetta, 
with a continent for their battle ground. 

Pozzo was at the elbow of the British ministry when the 
Peace of Amiens was broken and the twelve-year duel between 
England and France began. Next he went to Russia, and 
was with the Czar in the years he was warring on Napoleon. 
When Napoleon demanded his dismissal at Tilsit, he passed 
over to Austria, where he fomented the war of 1809. Flee- 
ing from Vienna with the Austrian court as the Emperor bore 
down upon that capital, he escaped him only by tramping 
over the Balkan mountains to Turkey. From Constantinople 
he found his way to England once more, and finally to 
Petrograd. Thenceforth he dogged the downward steps of 
his fellow-Corsican to Waterloo, to St. Helena and to the 
grave. 

A great war somewhere was inevitable to establish or over- 
throw the continental system which rested on bayonets and 



328 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

which had embroiled the world. For 1812 proved to be a red 
year in history. The flames of the French Revolution, which 
were kindled at the Bastille in 1789, had been spreading for 
twenty-three years. At last they had leaped the wide Atlan- 
tic, and two worlds were wrapped in an almost universal 
conflagration. 

The Americans and the British took up arms, and the In- 
dian with his tomahawk joined in the strife. Already Hi- 
dalgo had rung from his village church belfry the tocsin of 
revolution that was heard from the Oregon to Terra del 
Fuego, and Spanish America, taking advantage of the war in 
Spain, began its ten-year struggle for independence. The 
Spaniards and their English allies under Wellington, after 
four years of battling on the Peninsula, continued to baffle 
the best marshals of the Empire. Thus while an imperial 
army of 300,000 men was engaged in a futile effort to subdue 
one extremity of Europe, Napoleon was leading 600,000 more 
to conquer the opposite extremity of the continent. 



CHAPTER XXXIX 

ON TO MOSCOW 

1812 AGE 42-43 

WITH the Empress seated beside him and his trumpet- 
ers before him, with his court and his servants fol- 
lowing him in a long procession of coaches, Napo- 
leon left Paris as if for a fete on a beautiful May morning in 
the year 1812. Crossing France and the Rhine, he entered 
Germany, where the princes of his allied states humbly stood 
by the roadside and waited to make their obeisance as the King 
of the Kings of the earth passed by. The King of Saxony 
came out to greet the master from whom he had received his 
royal title and escort him to Dresden, where the Emperor of 
Austria, the King of Prussia, the King of Bavaria and the rest 
of the satraps of the Empire gathered to pay court to the 
sovereign of them all. 

As Napoleon had gathered the Czar and his other allies at 
Erfurt in 1808 to overawe Austria, he assembled the Emperor 
of Austria and his allies in this second congress of kings to 
let the Czar see that the monarchs of Europe were enlisted 
for the war as well as their contingents of soldiers in the great 
army which was already moving toward the Russian frontier. 
He was leaning confidently on the hope that a demonstration 
in force would bring Alexander to terms and that the Russian 
sovereign would not wait for him to invade the soil of his 
realm. "Alexander and I," he said in his review of the 
campaign, "were in the position of two boasters who, without 
wishing to fight, were endeavouring to frighten each other." 

When the Czar disappointed him by not showing any sign 
of flinching, no alternative remained to him but to dismiss 
his satellites and proceed to Poland and East Prussia to place 
himself at the head of his army. "The bottle is open," he 

329 



330 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

said, "and the wine must be drunk." How bitter its dregs 
were to be, no foretaste warned him as he left the beautiful 
city by the Elbe, into which, after seven months, he should 
silently steal back at night in a sleigh, his army lost, and with 
not even a trooper for his escort 

The bayonets of more than 600,000 men, drawn from 
twenty nations, ran like a hedge from the feet of the Car- 
pathian Mountains to the shores of the Baltic. Coming from 
the dunes by that northern sea, from the polders of the 
Netherlands, from the plains of Lombardy, and from the 
shores of Calabria, they formed the greatest army Europe 
ever had seen. All the races of the Caucasian world were 
in its ranks, and all the tongues of Christendom were heard 
in its camps. Perhaps no more than a third were French. 
Certainly more than a fourth were Germans from the Rhine 
states. There were 30,000 Austrians, under Prince Schwarzen- 
berg, and the Prussians numbered 20,000. Prince Eugene, 
Viceroy of Italy, brought 80,000 Italians. Prince Poniatow- 
ski had 60,000 Poles, and there were cohorts of Swiss, Dutch, 
Croatians, Spaniards and Portuguese. 

No ties of blood or language or nationality, no sentiment of 
patriotism united them. No conscious purpose animated 
them. They had not even been told whom they were to hate 
and why they were to slay. And less than ten in a hundred 
could read a line of print. They only knew they had been 
called out to fight for Napoleon. His sword had drawn them 
together and it alone must hold them together. 

The main body of the army moved over the wide level fields 
by the river Pregel, upon which the traveller to Petrograd 
in a later day looks from the car window of his Berlin train 
when he approaches the portals of the strange land of Muscovy. 
Although it is only an imaginary line, no other frontier the 
world round so stirs the imaginings. In a time of peace one 
looked in vain for visible signs of it. No great military 
fortifications were to be seen frowning across the chalk line 
that demarks the Empire of the Kaisers from the Empire of 
the Czars. 

Although the Occident visibly thinned out and tapered off 



ON TO MOSCOW 331 

through the closing hours of the trip from Konigsberg, Inster- 
burg, Gumbinnen and Eydtkuhnen, the last towns in Ger- 
many, were as resolutely Germanic as any place between the 
Rhine and the Niemen. German faces and German moustaches, 
German caps and German breweries still boldly asserted their 
nationality. But the German station master at Eydtkuhnen 
rang the warning bell, and the train had hardly more than 
pulled out of that German station than a little brook was 
crossed — and all things changed in a twinkling. 

That little brook is the moat between Germany and Russia, 
between the Teuton and the Muscovite, between the west and 
the east. "While the train was crossing the brook, a lightning 
change of scene took place that would do credit to the mech- 
anism of the theatrical stage. In the brief course of a jour- 
ney of only a mile between the German frontier station, at 
Eydtkuhnen, and the Russian frontier station at Wirballen, 
one civilisation vanished and another replaced it. 

Toward the Russian frontier Napoleon's legions moved in 
a front of 400 miles. Thus widely spread out, the oncoming 
host of twenty nations bewildered the Czar and his generals. 
There were 250,000 armed serfs drawn up to defend the 
frontier but the Russian commanders dared not concentrate 
their forces since the point of Napoleon's invasion was un- 
known. The handsome Czar himself had come from Petro- 
grad to an outpost of his empire and made his headquarters 
in the town of Vilna. There he was waiting and watching 
when the French Emperor swept down from the Baltic. The 
plumes of King Murat waved at the head of a magnificent 
body of cavalry ; another army marched under Prince Eugene 
and a third under the command of King Jerome of West- 
phalia. 

Napoleon's first purpose was to push back the boundary 
line of Russia, which had been stealthily moving westward 
over prostrate Poland. But he failed, and at his downfall 
Russia crept still farther forward, gathering in most of the 
territory of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. The railway pas- 
senger therefore rides fifty miles into the Empire, as it now 
is, before he comes to the frontier that Napoleon crossed, 



332 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

when he found the boundary in the middle of the Niemen 
at Kovno. 

A little way out of Kovno, there is a steep, round hill. 
The townspeople still call it the Hill of Napoleon, since from 
its crown he looked across the river one morning in the fourth 
week of June, 1812. He had discarded the too well known 
three-cornered black hat and green coat, and had disguised 
himself in the cap and cloak of a Polish soldier of his Guard. 
Standing there at the top, with his hundreds of thousands of 
soldiers swarming the forest behind him and with Russia ly- 
ing only over beyond the narrow stream, he hummed his war 
song while he spied out the best place for throwing his 
bridges. 

The Russians have a saying, ' ' The gates of Russia are wide 
to those who enter, but narrow to those who go out." That 
would be a fitting inscription for the pedestal of a monument 
which stands in the square before the Hotel de Ville at Kovno. 
For the Hill of Napoleon is not the only souvenir of its im- 
mortal but uninvited guest which the town cherishes. On 
that shaft in the x square, which was set up by the Czar Alex- 
ander, this grim tale is carved : 



RUSSIA, 

Surprised in 1812 by an Army of 700,000 

Men, 

Only 70,000 Repassed Her Frontier. 



The monumental stone was yet unquarried and the Czar 
was at Yilna, sixty miles away, when at midnight three pon- 
toons being completed, the men of twenty nations began to 
pour out of the forest and flow in torrents upon the unde- 
fended Russian shore. That bank of the Niemen at Kovno, 
therefore, well may be called the high-water mark of the red 
tide of the French Revolution. It was there that the mighty 
force which took its rise when the French people burst the 
old Bourbon dam, broke and spent itself on the sandy wastes. 



ON TO MOSCOW 333 

The Russian commanders, as Napoleon intended they 
should, had divided their army when they saw his multitudes 
flowing upon them from every direction. Thus separated, it 
was impossible for them to make a stand. While the two 
Russian armies, therefore, fell back in an effort to get together 
and present a solid front, Napoleon moved forward between 
them in an effort to keep them apart and destroy them singly. 

He was disappointed at the outset of the campaign, when, 
after making preparations to fight for a foothold on the banks 
of the Niemen, he was permitted to cross unmolested and was 
welcomed to a desolate shore. Dashing off to Vilna the next 
day with the Guard, he marched for three days through a 
terrible tempest of rain and sleet and wind, unchallenged ex- 
cept by roaring and flashing thunderbolts, the Russian out- 
posts everywhere vanishing like deer into the depths of the 
forests. Already the climate, with its sudden and fierce varia- 
tions, was collecting its toll, and 10,000 horses had perished, 
frozen to death in June! 

As Napoleon neared Vilna not a bayonet remained to de- 
fend it. Surprise and anger clouded the Emperor's brow 
when he entered the gate of that capital of Lithuania. 

The Napoleon of Rivoli, of Egypt, of Marengo, of Austerlitzv 
would have left the abandoned town of Vilna, and raced after 
the retreating foe. Alas, the Napoleon who sat down there for 
seventeen days was no longer the eagle that once flew over 
mountains and deserts. At Austerlitz he had foretold the 
change: "I shall be good for only six years more of war." 
Those six years and more had now rolled over his care-bur- 
dened head. They had left in his face "two creases, which 
extended from the base of the nose to the brow," and soft 
indulgences had turned his muscles of steel to fat, inclining 
him to the couch rather than the saddle. 

The swift Napoleonic fashion of warfare was as athletic 
as the sports of the ring or the diamond, and the Emperor's 
forty-two years weighed upon him as heavily as upon a pugil- 
ist or a ball-player. So the warrior, famoused for fight, 
tarried at Vilna almost as long as it took him to finish his 
Marengo, Ulm, Austerlitz or Jena campaigns. 



334 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

While he lay on the floor with his head close to such maps; 
as he could get — for like Alexander of Macedon and Fred- 
erick the Great, he was near-sighted — he scolded Prince Eu- 
gene, Marshal Davout, and King Jerome for not rounding up 
the enemy. Week after week, the marshals of France ranged 
the Lithuanian wilderness without running down the foe, and 
they lost men and horses faster than they ever had seen them 
fall on the battlefield. Torrential downpours washed away the 
cart tracks which served as roads and the supply trains were 
stalled. With nothing to eat but green rye and the thatch 
torn from the roofs of the people's huts, the horses sickened 
and died by the thousands on every march. Already the 
cavalry were being dismounted. On the other hand, the Cos- 
sack horse of the Russian cavalry was inured to privation and 
had the tastes and digestion of the goat. 

The invading soldiers soon were on short rations, and passed 
in a rapid descent from wine and brandy to beer, then to 
the stupefying, brutalising native intoxicant, vodka, or to 
muddy swamp water. Foraging in a land grubbed by the 
retreating Russians, was miserably poor. The houses a mile 
apart were mostly wretched dens more fit for bears than hu- 
man beings. The foreigners could well starve on what suf- 
ficed the troops of the Czar, who drew his soldiers from the 
estates of the nobles, and the landlords naturally sent him their 
poorest serfs. The strangers could not swallow the native 
bread. Some grenadiers happening upon a large quantity 
of the very acme of Russian delicacy, were greasing their 
boots with it when an officer, a Parisian gourmet, rescued the 
caviare from such base use. 

The dreary, dead level monotony of Russia, with its squalid 
villages, its unkempt fields and melancholy forests of fir, alder,, 
and willow, oppresses the spirit of a traveller, who passes it 
in review from his car window at the rate of thirty miles an 
hour. It utterly overwhelmed many sensitive natures in the 
Grand Army as they marched and counter-marched under 
the blazing sun or through wild blizzards. 

The men dared not lay down their arms for a minute, step 
out of the ranks or go anywhere except in strong bands, for 



ON TO MOSCOW 335 

the dreaded Cossacks seemed always to be lurking in the 
gloomy shadows. The French ceased to curse, and the Ger- 
mans ceased to sing. Homesickness became a well-defined 
and widely prevalent disease. Not a few forlorn boys leaned 
their heads on their muskets and chose to look in the muzzles 
rather than endure the anguished longings for their own fair 
lands. 

In five weeks the Grand Army made only 250 miles. That 
advance, although unopposed by any enemy in arms, had cost 
it nearly a third of its strength. One of the German divisions 
had lost a full half of its men. Of the 360,000 in the columns 
that had crossed the Niemen at Kovno, only 250,000 remained, 
flung out along a front of 150 miles. 

For fifteen days the Emperor tarried at the city of Vitebsk. 
He tore down houses about his headquarters in the town to 
give him an open space on which to review his troops, and 
he appealed to the imperial librarian at Paris for some 
"amusing books" as he had "moments of leisure not easy to 
fill here." After losing that precious fortnight and more of 
the short summer, he left the city by the Duna and crossed 
over the Dneiper, the great river of Muscovy, down which 
Odin and Rurik, with the fierce multitudes of the north, had 
journeyed to the Black Sea and descended upon Constan- 
tinople. 

Onward the Grand Army toiled out of Lithuania into the 
real Russia, into "White Russia," until it stood before the 
many towered brick wall of sacred Smolensk, whose white 
domes gleam in the sun on the heights above the Dneiper. 
When Napoleon learned that the Russian armies were together 
and united for the defence of the city, he clapped his hands 
and rejoiced, "At last I have them." 

Again, however, he lost a day before closing in upon the 
elusive foe, and it was noon of the following day when his 
batteries opened fire. All afternoon the walls of the city 
withstood a pelting hail of lead, though the wooden houses be- 
hind it repeatedly caught fire. At the late setting of the 
northern sun, Smolensk still defied its assailants. 

The fires within the walls continued to spread through the 



336 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

night. They cast a glare upon Napoleon's face as he sat be- 
fore the door of his tent, gazing at the burning town. When 
the sun rose after a brief August night, its first rays disclosed 
the battered walls without a defender mounted upon them 
and the city wrapped in silence and in fiames. 

The quarry had escaped again, and the inhabitants had 
fled after the soldiers. Instead of destroying the enemy and 
capturing a rich city, Napoleon, at the cost of 12,000 men, 
had conquered another desolation as useless as the wilds of 
Lithuania. 

He was now nearly 400 miles from the frontier and still 
without the decisive battle that he had expected to deliver 
as soon as he entered the dominions of the Czar. As he had 
marched deeper and deeper into the vast Russian wastes, and 
farther and farther into the short Russian summer, he had 
looked upon Smolensk as the goal of his campaign. But its 
warehouses were burned or empty, and the invader had to 
bivouac on the ashes of the city. There were no supplies for 
the men and the animals. And a hungry army cannot stand 
still in the presence of starvation. 

Hour after hour the Emperor faced the hard choice pre- 
sented to him, murmuring as he paced his headquarters and 
debated with himself. Should he stop or turn back or go 
on .' The problem really had passed beyond his own decision. 
In supreme emergencies the will of an army always overrules 
the will of its commander. When the soldiers have had 
enough of fighting, the battle is ended, regardless of the wishes 
of the general. When they are starving, they can be suc- 
cessfully marched only in the direction of food. 

With nothing but starvation and disease behind him and 
the ruins of a burned and deserted city about him, Napoleon 
passed out of the gate of Smolensk in the middle of a night 
late in August and, on the heels of the ever-retreating Rus- 
sians, took the road to Moscow. Meanwhile the Czar was 
vowing to his British military adviser, Sir Robert Wilson, 
"I would sooner let my beard grow to my waist and live on 
potatoes in Siberia than permit any negotiation with Napoleon 
while an armed Frenchman remains on the soil of Russia." 



ON TO MOSCOW 337 

After Kutusof, the Russian commander, had fallen back to 
within seventy-five miles of Moscow, he yielded to the pres- 
sure of his officers and men and of the indignant nobles of that 
city. Against his own instincts, he took a stand at last, and 
drew up his 120,000 soldiers across the road where it passes, at 
the village of Borodino, over a branch of the Moskva river. 

There he paraded before his kneeling warriors a most ven- 
erated image of the Holy Virgin, while the priests of the 
Greek church gave them absolution and the injunction to 
die, if they must, to save the Holy City of Russia from the 
sacrilegious hordes of the west. It was equally characteristic 
of Napoleon, on the other hand, to display to his Guard on an 
easel in front of his tent a large portrait of the King of Rome, 
which Marie Louise had sent him from Paris. 

The story of the battle is not a tale of strategy and sur- 
prises, but of stubborn ferocity on both sides and headlong 
plunges. Nor did Napoleon sit his white Arab as at Auster- 
litz, manoeuvring his forces like a switchman in his tower. 
On the contrary, he chose a point of observation on a hill 
three quarters of a mile from the front of his army. There 
he sat on a camp stool with his feet on a drum, sometimes ap- 
parently asleep. He rose from time to time to rest his tele- 
scope on a guardsman's shoulder, or again, in an effort to 
warm his feet, he paced back and forth a few minutes until 
the slight exertion seemed to have exhausted him. 

He did not mount his horse in the course of the long, hard 
fought day until the fighting virtually was at an end. A 
painful functional disorder is said to have unfitted him for 
the saddle, and a severe cold — Constant had neglected to give 
him his waterproof boots the day before — left him dull and 
inert and hardly able to speak. 

The two armies were about equal in numbers. The brutal 
and deadly tempest of fire and death raged from six to six, 
when the Russians, with nearly 40,000 of their comrades 
fallen about their feet, sullenly gave way. But they retired 
slowly and in good order only a few paces from the crim- 
soned field. There they chanted their Te Deums and boasted 
of victory in the hearing of their foes, whose own loss of al- 



338 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

most thirty thousand made up an awful total that gave the 
battle the unhappy distinction of being the bloodiest of the 
nineteenth century. 

When, the next morning, the Russians resumed their 
retreat and the Grand Army its advance from Borodino, the 
famished invaders were spurred forward by their longing for 
the fat larders and the fabled riches of Moscow. It was the 
one hope left them and ' ' a Moscou ! a Moscou ! ' ' was the last 
remaining cry to stir their wasted ranks. 

Necessity had become the mother of Napoleon's strategy. 
He only obeyed the instincts of his famished soldiers in ven- 
turing beyond Smolensk. As he promised them in his bul- 
letins, "You shall see Moscow," he promised himself, "Peace 
waits for me at the gates of Moscow;" but Prince Eugene 
came away from his stepfather sighing, "Moscow will be our 
ruin." 

The bottle was open and the wine had to be drunk ! 



CHAPTER XL 
THE TORCH THAT FIRED THE WORLD 

1812 AGE 43 

HIGH above a graceful bend in the Moskva river, rises 
the most renowned of the seven hills of the Russian 
Rome. On that Hill of the Pilgrim, or Hill of Salu- 
tation, the pilgrims were wont to bow in awe and cross them- 
selves while they saluted "Holy Mother Moscow." There, 
too, the poor wretches condemned to a Siberian exile were 
privileged to pause and feast their sad eyes before taking up 
their chains for the long march to the grave of the living 
dead. 

Vulgarly the height is called Sparrow Hill, and its cafes 
now are the resort of the tea bibbers of the city. Close by 
where the samovars are enthroned to-day, Napoleon stood on 
a sunny afternoon in September, 1812. Looking across the 
wide fields of the convent in the river bed, he gazed upon 
the ivory white walls and gaily painted roofs, upon the forest 
of spires, towers, pinnacles, and minarets, upon the countless 
domes of gold and green and blue that form the unique and 
dazzling panorama of Moscow. "It is time! it is time!" he 
sighed as his eyes rested on the city of many and wonderful 
colours, where the sunbeams turned to shimmering gold the 
lacy chains falling like veils over the eight pointed Russian 
crosses, which sprang from their crescents as if to symbolise 
the triumph of the Christian over the Moslem. 

He had paid a terrible price for that sight from Sparrow 
Hill, but then it was one that never before had been beheld by 
a conqueror out of the west. Did not the tears freeze on the 
youthful cheeks of Charles XII of Sweden because he was de- 

339 



340 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

nied the joy of looking upon those clustered towers of the 
Kremlin ? 

With Moscow at his feet, all the capitals of the European 
continent had knelt and kissed the sword of Napoleon. Mos- 
cow had cost him dear, but it was the rarest in his collection. 
Before possessing himself of his fair captive, of this Oriental 
beauty that he had spent 200,000 lives to win, he wished to 
gratify his dramatic sense and thrill the world by making an 
imposing spectacle of her abject surrender and of his own 
magnanimity. 

While he waited for his vanguard to arrange a fitting cere- 
monial of the delivery of the keys, the city of the Czars lay 
as if in a languorous afternoon slumber on the banks of the 
Moskva. No murmur rose from behind her walls. Not a 
wreath of smoke floated above her chimneys. 

The report crept up the hill that Moscow was deserted and 
that even its keys were gone. The startling rumour sank to a 
whisper as it reached the outer circle of the group about 
Napoleon. When, at last, some one dared repeat it to him, he 
refused to believe it and despatched members of his staff into 
the mute city to search out the members of the nobility in 
their hiding places. 

In their Spanish pride, the people of Madrid had hid from 
him but they had not fled their homes and forsaken their 
capital. A city of 300,000 depopulated? The sacred city of 
the empire abandoned ? All those great palaces deserted ? 
The altars of those 300 churches untended? C'est impos- 
sible ! Even when convinced of the truth, he persisted in his 
desire for a ceremony. Declining to enter the city until the 
next day, he passed the night in the odorous squalor of an 
abandoned house by one of the gates. 

Moscow was, indeed, almost a solitude. As the Russian 
army, under General Kutusof, retreated from Borodino the 
morning after the frightful battle, Moscow had clamoured in 
vain for military protection. When Kutusof called a council 
of war, it voted to stand or fall for the salvation of the sacred 
town. But he ignored the decision and, with tears in his 
eyes, marched through Moscow, leaving it defenceless. 



THE TORCH THAT FIRED THE WORLD 341 

The inhabitants rose, and crowded the gates in a flight on 
the heels of the retreating army. In the instinctive repug- 
nance of a primitive patriotism, they scorned to stay and 
breathe an atmosphere polluted by the presence of an alien 
conqueror. 

Leaving their altars and turning their backs on their 
homes and their churches, bearing aloft their revered ikons 
and singing plaintive songs, the people passed out of the city 
in long processions. The great nobles forsook their splendid 
palaces and spacious parks and drove away in their brilliant 
four and six-horse equipages, their thousands of serfs run- 
ning after them. The rich merchants left their warehouses 
and shops filled with unguarded wealth, and joined in the 
exodus. The rest of the population rushed into the coun- 
try, with no thought of where they should find food or shelter. 

The governor unlocked the gates of the prisons and the ar- 
senals, and, rolling barrels of vodka out of the liquor ware- 
houses, he left them standing open in the streets. Having thus 
given Moscow over to armed and drunken criminals and 
vagrants, he slipped out of his back door and stole away in 
the rear of the fugitive populace. 

Even while the people were still pouring out of the farther 
gates of Moscow, the towers of the abandoned city rose to the 
view of the hungry, dirty, sadly reduced army of twenty na- 
tions. Never suspecting the desolation that lay before them, 
the soldiers raised the exultant cry, ' ' Moscow ! Moscow ! 
Moscow ! at last ! " To them the name meant food and drink 
and rest, and they were as impatient and eager as a weary 
traveller, who, after a long journey, comes in sight of home. 

Murat's cavalry dashed into the city, but only to find in 
all the wilderness of houses and streets a few thousand people, 
among them the brutish jail birds who had rushed out of the 
open gates of their prisons. Except for these and the help- 
less sick and wounded in the hospitals, the great city was a 
desert. The candles still burned on the altars which were 
decorated as for a holy day. Not a woman was seen on the 
streets nor a face at the windows. Drunken men lay on the 
pavements lapping up the intoxicants that flowed in the gut- 



342 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

ter, while the more sober were wildly running about among 
the big mansions, stealing everything they could carry away. 
As the hungry soldiers threw themselves upon the city, they 
beat off the native looters, and Moscow became the undisputed 
spoil of the alien invader. 

While the French sentries, patrolling the wall of the Krem- 
lin that starry night, looked out over the ghostly city and 
watched a comet which glared like a portent in the sky, they 
saw fire after fire flaming up above the roofs in many sec- 
tions of the town. A foe more terrible than the Cossack was 
rising to challenge the invaders, who were roused from their 
sleep to beat him back and save from destruction the only 
prize they had won since crossing the Niemen. 

When Napoleon entered the gate the next morning and 
went to the Kremlin, his captive city had been snatched from 
him by the banded demons of fire and liquor, hunger and 
plunder. The beautiful domes and towers he had admired 
from the hill were wrapped one after another in the wither- 
ing embrace, the church roofs of sheet iron and lead falling 
with loud crashes. Palaces were swept away in a scorching 
breath, the sculptures that adorned their fagades crashing 
amid the ruins. The pitiless flames would not spare the hos- 
pitals, where thousands, unable to drag themselves into the 
streets, perished in their wards. Above the roaring surges 
of fire, there rang out the groans of the dying, the shrieks of 
the plundered, the crack of the soldiers' musketry, the howl- 
ing of the dogs chained to the gates of the houses. 

On the third day, Napoleon's officers repeatedly came to 
warn him that the fire was roaring at the Kremlin gates and to 
beg him to retreat before it. But not until it was difficult for 
him to breathe and Berthier had come to report that he had 
been almost swept from the battlements in a red whirlwind, 
did the Emperor consent to take flight. 

The hill of the Kremlin rose like an island in a tossing sea 
of fire, and Napoleon had great difficulty in finding an avenue 
of escape. In street after street he was turned back by a 
hail of flying embers, and the hoofs of the horses were 
burned by the blistering paving stones. With a cloak over 



THE TORCH THAT FIRED THE WORLD 343 

his face to protect his eyes and mouth from the stifling breath 
of the flames, he was wandering bewildered in the blinding 
atmosphere, when some soldiers, recognising the imperial 
party, escorted it to the Petrofsky palace, the suburban villa 
of the Czars. Even there, at a distance of two miles, the Em- 
peror could read in the light of the blazing city. 

As he looked down upon the inferno he exclaimed, "What a 
people ! They are the Scythians, indeed ! ' ' Naturally he as- 
sumed that the Russians had fired their capital and doomed it 
to ashes rather than let it be his prey. Whether Moscow 
really was immolated on the pyre of patriotism, the world 
never will surely know. When it was seen that its destruc- 
tion had driven out the invaders and saved the empire, the 
harebrained governor who at first had blamed the French for 
burning it, noisily avowed that he himself had ordered it 
burnt. And other Russians, flattered by the thought of such 
an heroic sacrifice, adopted his story. 

Yet it is possible that Moscow was not destroyed by 
official design any more than it was abandoned by official de- 
sign. For the Moscow that looked so fair when Napoleon saw 
it from Sparrow Hill was only a painted show and but a huge 
tinder box. It was easy and natural enough for its wooden 
houses to take fire when left to the mercy of frenzied looters, 
prowling over them with torches in hand, and the equinoxial 
winds were present to complete the havoc. 

The hurricane of fire swept the town for two days more 
until a rain quenched the flames. When Napoleon returned 
to the Kremlin, which had suffered no great damage, the city 
was a sorry sight. The big warehouses, the shops and bazars, 
the grand palaces of the nobility were gone. No less than 
6500 of the 9000 buildings had been destroyed, and most of 
Moscow was but a heap of rubbish. 

Napoleon was marooned on an ash pile more than 2000 
miles from Paris. His marauding soldiers found an over- 
abundance of wines and brandies. They arrayed them- 
selves in costly furs and rare eastern shawls and decked 
out the women in their "love escort" with rich gowns 
and blazing jewels. Neither the altars nor the graves were 



344 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

spared by the pillagers. But they quickly exhausted the 
little food that the fleeing residents had left behind, and 
bread became more precious than the precious metals. 

Meanwhile, benumbed by the terrible blow that had fallen 
upon him, Napoleon sat day after day in the gloom of the 
oriental palace at the Kremlin. Bad news came to him from 
Spain, where his brother, Joseph, was being driven from his 
capital. Grave warnings were sounded of an uneasy spirit in 
Prussia and Austria. Sometimes as he wrestled alone with 
his black problem, hours passed without a word from the Em- 
peror's lips. 

Like a dog mortally injured, as Count Tolstoi says, the 
Grand Army sat down amid the ruins of Moscow to lick its 
wounds. Daily the sun blazed redder in the dull autumnal 
sky. September waned. The nights lengthened and the long 
Russian winter drew on. Five precious summer weeks had 
passed when the Russian army, resuming active operations, 
aroused Napoleon and compelled him to face the inevitable. 
He must retreat from that desert of cinders, before the long 
road home was barricaded with Russian bayonets or buried 
beneath Russian snows. 

October was far advanced when he turned back upon his 
trail of disaster. If a Russian summer had slain half his 
army in the advance, how many could survive a retreat in a 
Russian winter? 

As if to fire a parting shot at the Czar, the retreating Em- 
peror ordered his rear guard to mine and blow up the Krem- 
lin. The earth shivered from the mighty explosion and much 
damage was wrought, but that strange city within a city sur- 
vived the shock and stands unto this day to tell the story of 
how its walls baffled fire and sword in 1812. Those walls 
wind for more than a mile about the hill that rises from the 
banks of the Moskva in the midst of a city with a present 
population of a million and a quarter. For the Kremlin is as 
much in the centre of Moscow as Westminster is in London, 
the Palais Royal in Paris, the Quirinal in Rome, the Schloss in 
Berlin, the White House in Washington, the City Hall in New 
York or the Common in Boston. 



THE TORCH THAT FIRED THE WORLD 345 

Not that the most melancholy of Napoleon 's abodes this side 
of St. Helena really is to be compared with any of those places. 
The Kremlin is peculiar to itself. At once a fortress and a 
shrine, it is rather the Muscovite Alhambra, where in other 
times a numerous court dwelt and frolicked and worshipped. 
It is the village which expanded into an empire. It is the 
natal den of the Russian bear, whence he stole forth to plant 
his paw upon a full seventh of the earth's surface. 

Behind those walls, the dukes of Moscow shielded themselves 
from the arrows of the Golden Horde ; there Ivan the Terrible 
held his savage court; there a sixteen-year-old boy founded 
the dynasty of the Romanoffs; there was born the epileptic, 
hairless Peter the Great. 

In his envy of his bewhiskered subjects, Peter laid a fine 
of 100 roubles on every beard passing through the Redeemer 
Gate and cruelly filled the Kremlin with unimaginable hor- 
rors. When at last he grew weary of cutting perverse heads 
off stubborn necks, he abandoned Moscow entirely to set up his 
throne and erect a new capital on the wild and dreary marshes 
of the Neva. 

The Kremlin ceased thenceforth to be the seat of imperial 
power, although it still pretended to be a military strong- 
hold when Napoleon ordered its destruction. Its old walls, 
even though they are from thirty to seventy feet high and 
from fourteen to twenty feet thick, are now only a harmless 
relic of a bygone age of warfare, and water no longer flows in 
the moat, where in the green shade the children play and 
lovers sigh. 

Notwithstanding the Czars have reigned at Petrograd for 
more than 200 years, each in turn has faithfully come 
back to be anointed and crowned at the ancient altar of the 
cathedral in the Kremlin. Thither Nicholas II came a pilgrim 
in the midsummer of 1914, to invoke the favour of Heaven 
for Russian arms in the War of the Nations. 

The city that Peter built on the Neva is only a thing of 
brick and stone and mortar. Moscow remains to the Rus- 
sians the holy city and the Kremlin hill is its Mt. Moriah, the 
sanctuary of the holy of holies. 



346 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

While the Kremlin celebrates the glories of the Empire of 
the Czars, it commemorates as well the defeat of Napoleon, 
whose empire, like a great ship on a rock, was beaten to pieces 
against its walls. It is indeed a colossal monument of a most 
colossal failure. At its very portal the visitor is confronted 
with a reminder of the extraordinary disaster of 1812. It is 
the grey stone gate of St. Nicholas, where Poles and Tartars 
and Muscovites have fought and bled these hundreds of years. 

Above the gate rises a bell tower, with its miraculous image 
or ikon of St. Nicholas. Although the French laid a mine 
under the gate and blew its tower to fragments, as a memorial 
tablet records, the ikon "by the wonderful power of God" 
was unharmed and even the pane of glass over it and the lan- 
tern and candle belonging to it were not broken. Wherefore, 
the tablet triumphantly inquires, "Who is greater than God, 
our God, the marvellous God who doest miracles by his 
saints?" 

Another of the sixteen gates that pierce the Kremlin wall 
is even more venerated and with a still more miraculous ikon, 
which centuries ago confounded and dispersed the besieging 
Tartars. Through this gate the Czars all go to their corona- 
tions. No one, not even the most hurrying drosky driver, 
passes in or out of it with covered head. And anybody in 
the genuflecting throng that daily pours through it could tell 
the stranger that Napoleon paid dear for refusing to uncover 
at that Gate of the Redeemer! 

Entering the gate, the unwarned stranger is startled by a 
mob of towers and domes and a riot of colour and architec- 
ture. Possibly he may be surprised to see before him not one 
great palaee or castle, but a city of palaces and gardens, of 
churches, shrines, and convents, of museums, courts and bar- 
racks, of streets and open squares. 

For the Kremlin really is a city in itself. It has no less 
than ten churches and as many as three dozen big bells, in- 
cluding the Napoleon bell, so called because it was cast from 
metal dug out of the fire ruins. 

Each of the Kremlin churches has its own bitter memory 
of the Napoleonic invasion, but the bitterest of all lurks in 



THE TORCH THAT FIRED THE WORLD 347 

the dusk of the special church of the Czars. There on the 
very altar before which the Romanoffs kneel to receive the oil 
of consecration, the alien soldiers squatted and gambled with 
cards, while they stabled their horses in its nave and chapels, 
even as they had desecrated the great mosque of el Ahzar at 
Cairo. The church, however, has its triumph to offset its 
shame, for its present chandeliers were cast from 900 pounds 
of stolen silver that the Cossacks recaptured from the retreat- 
ing Grand Army. 

On everything that glistened in the churches of the Krem- 
lin the soldiers laid their pillaging hands. Not only were 
the gold and silver ikons and vessels dumped into the melting 
pot, but even the gold leaf was stripped from the images and 
decorations. 

The most conspicuous of the towers, that of Ivan or John, 
recalls the day when the Emperor stood before it personally 
superintending the removal of its enormous cross. And for 
what purpose? To send it to Paris and place it above the 
dome of the Hotel des Invalides. But the immense thing 
tumbled and crashed, nearly killing its impious assailants. 
Only by that lucky mischance was Napoleon spared the igno- 
miny of finding his grave beneath a stolen cross. 

The palace of Napoleon, or that part of it which he occupied, 
in the Kremlin, was torn down long ago. In place of it, the 
Czars have the most palatial of all the palaces in Europe, with 
great halls of glistening marble and gleaming gold, hung in 
red and blue, with noble columns of rarest stones and thou- 
sands upon thousands of electric lights glowing in its chande- 
liers. 

The faithful in their pilgrimage to the Kremlin meet with 
many mementoes of its invasion to tempt them away from 
the Christian principle of forgiveness. The Russian, how- 
ever, seems to be innocent of any petty spite toward Na- 
poleon's memory. Try to imagine the Americans setting up 
in their capital a statue of the British general who burned 
Washington in 1814 ! Yet almost the first object that rises to 
the view of the visitor to the treasury or the museum of the 
Kremlin is a great marble statue of the Emperor of the 



348 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

French. His gift of a service of Sevres, which he made to the 
Czar in the days of their fraternizing, is also cherished there 
among the precious keepsakes of the nation. Apparently 
Alexander did not send his presents back when they quar- 
relled ! 

Napoleon's sleigh is there, brought in by the Cossacks, who 
captured it, and even his bed, which was picked up on the 
banks of the Beresina after his flight over the river, stands 
beside the bed of Peter the Great and the enormous boots of 
that giant monarch. A large portrait of him which the Cos- 
sacks brought back from the Waterloo campaign completes 
the story of how Russia avenged herself by chasing the in- 
vader clear across the European continent. A still more con- 
clusive exhibit is formed by a row of 879 cannon captured 
from the retreating army of twenty nations, and which 
stretches the full length of the arsenal wall in the Kremlin. 

The greatest monument of all the memorials of Napoleon's 
repulse from Moscow, however, stands just outside the Krem- 
lin wall. It is the magnificent Church of Our Saviour, which 
Alexander intended to erect on Sparrow Hill, where it would 
have mocked the memory of Napoleon's fleeting moment of 
triumph there. After an immense amount of money had been 
spent in a vain effort to find a firm foundation on the hill, 
the plan was changed and the church was set up in front of 
the very gate through which the invading Emperor passed into 
the Kremlin. 

There, on the bank of the Moskva, rises this grandest and 
costliest of all the war monuments in the world. There, by 
the Kremlin gate, the nation sends up in purest white marble 
its prayer of thanksgiving, its Te Deum, while within its walls 
there rises at high mass a burst of song that ravishes the soul. 
From a lofty gallery, the visitor looks down upon the lacy 
marble of the snowy altar, with its priests in their rich vest- 
ments of gold, and upon a multitude of worshippers, some- 
times as many as 15,000 standing on a floor of jasper. 

The beautiful baritone of the priestly chant mounts higher 
and higher until it seems like the crescendo of a great pipe 
organ. Then a famous choir marches down a lane made by 



THE TORCH THAT FIRED THE WORLD 349 

the soldiers, who have pushed the people back, and takes its 
stand in the centre of the church. From the hundreds of 
throats of those well-drilled choristers, unaccompanied by any 
instruments, the choirmaster draws a wonderful variety of 
tones, high and low, a glorious symphony that is more like the 
music of a great orchestra than of the voices of young peasants 
whose parents were born into Russian serfdom. 

This church is the most imposing, the most interesting, the 
most significant of all the souvenirs of Napoleon's capture 
and abandonment of Moscow. There is something thoroughly 
characteristic of Russia, something peculiar to the Russian 
nature, something very expressive of a nation whose patriot- 
ism and religion are one and the same thing in this religious 
edifice built to celebrate the deliverance of Moscow from a 
military invasion. 

Other Christian people rear temples and columns and arches 
in imitation of the classic pagans. They are either monuments 
of revenge or of self glorification. Even the medals that 
Alexander I struck and gave all his soldiers who pursued Na- 
poleon from the Moskva to the Seine, did not glorify arms, 
but God. On the medals the eye in the triangle was engraved 
as a symbol of God's providence, and they were inscribed 
"Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy name!" 

It was in that spirit of gratefulness to the Divine Power 
that Russia chose to make her great war memorial a votive 
offering. It was in that spirit that she dedicated to "Christ, 
Our Saviour," the noble church whose dome, the loftiest and 
most golden of the domes of a new Moscow risen from the 
ashes, would be the first to draw his gaze could Napoleon re- 
treat from the realms of shade to revisit the glimpses of the 
moon and walk again on Sparrow Hill. 



CHAPTER XLI 
THE GREAT TRAGEDY 

1812-1813 AGE 43 

HAVING seen at last that he must "abandon that pile 
of rubbish," Napoleon marched his army out of the 
still smoking ruins of Moscow on an October morning 
in 1812 and began his long retreat from Russia. 

The retreating mass had hardly crowded past the gates 
of the city, when its wagons began to stall and its sumptuous 
carriages which had been stolen from the stables of the no- 
bility began to break down. As the Emperor overtook it and 
pushed his way through, it was already a disorganised rabble. 
He no longer commanded a Grand Army, but was swept along 
helplessly in the midst of the strangest horde that Europe 
had seen since the Goths poured out of the German forests. 

Cursing and shouting in a babel of languages, the confused 
and motley procession stretched its length for miles and miles 
as it wound its way over the illimitable Russian steppes. 
If the men under arms numbered 100,000, and no one knows 
how many there really were, they were followed by half as 
many more noncombatants, who clung to the legs of the toil- 
ing army and held it back. Some of these were prisoners, 
some were servants ; many were mere hangers on. Beside the 
cantine women and other hardy members of the "love escort" 
who had survived the advance, there were French and other 
foreign women residents of Moscow, who were fleeing from 
the wrath of the Muscovites. 

There were 2000 army wagons and 570 cannons to be 
dragged over the long weary road ahead and all manner of 
other vehicles loaded down with the spoils of Moscow. Some 
foolish looters had piled their booty on wheelbarrows, and 
were starting to push it 2000 miles across Europe. 

350 



THE GREAT TRAGEDY 351 

No army ever was so heavily encumbered with baggage. 
It was plunder poor at the outset. Count Tolstoi has likened 
it to a monkey whose hand is caught in the narrow neck of a 
jar of nuts but who refuses to open his fist and draw it out 
for fear of dropping his loot. 

Weighted down with gold and silver, with rich stores of rare 
wines and liquors, with great stocks of beautiful gowns and 
gold laced coats, the mob began a march of many hundreds! 
of miles and many weeks through a barren wilderness in a 
Russian winter — with worn-out boots and summer uniforms 
and food enough for only ten days! 

Napoleon had hoped to throw the enemy off the scent. 
When Kutusof overtook him, however, he was only five days 
from Moscow. Thenceforth he had to back out of Russia, 
with his pursuer pressing upon him at every step. Night 
and day his soldiers were forever beset by Cossack cavalry. 
They had to fight not only for roads and bridges, but also take 
turns in warding off the swarming pests while their comrades 
slept or stopped to cook a meal. 

After passing by the field of Borodino, on which 40,000 of 
the battle slain lay unburied where they had fallen seven weeks 
before, another enemy more grim than any foe in arms closed 
in upon the retreating band. Hunger now pitilessly assailed 
and swiftly thinned its ranks. There was hardly a grain of 
wheat within twenty miles of the road on either side. For 
the two rival armies while passing through the country in 
August and September had eaten it bare and burned the 
villages. The poor peasantry had received an impressive 
illustration of the expressive Russian saying : ' ' When wolves 
fight, the sheep lose their wool." 

In the presence of starvation, the gaudy and useless spoils 
of Moscow were cast aside in disgust. The Russians, as they 
followed along, found the highway strewn with discarded 
treasures and abandoned wagons and cannons. Comrades 
and messmates began to hide from one another their flour, 
rice, or potatoes as something too precious to be shared. Un- 
fed horses sank in their traces, only to be seized upon as food, 
while a black cloud of vultures hovered in the rear like gulls 



352 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

in the wake of a ship at sea, and packs of howling wolves 
also took up the chase. 

Nearly half the army was lost in the first two weeks of the 
retreat, on the first 150 miles of the march. And not more 
than a fourth of them had fallen before the human foe and 
met a soldier's death. All that havoc was wrought before the 
end of the first week in November, when the weather was so 
unseasonably mild that it was remarked as a gift from fortune 
to her long-time favourite. Napoleon's bulletin likened it 
to "the sun and the beautiful days of a trip to Fontaine- 
bleau." There was not even a serious frost the first week, 
and the temperature did not fall below the freezing point 
until the army was twelve days out. At the end of sixteen 
days the Emperor still described the weather as "perfect." 
Yet his armed force had dwindled to 55,000 men ! 

Napoleon was not overwhelmed by the elements in his 
Russian campaign. Neither the fires of Moscow nor the snows 
of the steppes undid him. On the contrary, before ever he 
looked upon Moscow and as he was advancing in summer, 
half his army had melted away, while in a fortnight of a 
genial autumn he lost nearly half his retreating army. The 
weather was not to blame for the stupendous disaster of 1812. 
The hosts of the twenty nations perished for the simple, un- 
dramatic reason that they did not have enough to eat. Had 
they been housed at home in warm barracks they could not 
have lived on the food and drink they found in Russia. By 
the end of ten days after the retreat began there was neither 
bread nor beef for the men. 

Truly an army moves on its belly. On coming to Russia 
Napoleon had violated one of his own axioms, "Never make 
war on a desert." When, in a mad conceit, he marched more 
than 600,000 men into a poverty-stricken wilderness, where 
they could not live off the country and where the roads were 
so poor that the supply trains were stalled, he sealed their 
doom and his own. Neither General January nor General 
February nor yet General Kutusof was needed to fix his fate. 
For there was only a broken fragment of the army left when 



THE GREAT TRAGEDY 353 

the first snowflake fell in the third week of the retreat. Nor 
did Napoleon lose a battle on Russian soil. 

As the winter drew on, another disaster befell the remnant 
of the army from still another prosaic cause. In the confident 
summer days when supplies were laid in, thought had not 
been taken of the possibility of a winter campaign, and no 
calks were provided for the horses' shoes. The horses of 
the cavalry, the hospital wagons, the supply trains and the 
guns not being sharp-shod, slipped on the ice, and when they 
fell, there was small chance of their finding strength to get up 
again. For want of a little sharp-pointed piece of iron, there- 
fore, the army suffered worse than from some far more 
picturesque causes. 

With the coming of the snow, the sleet and the icy blasts 
of winter, the men not only had to struggle for food, but 
for shelter as well. "Even the ravens froze." To be sure, 
the temperature never approached the low levels to which 
American soldiers have been exposed in some Indian cam- 
paigns. But many of Napoleon's men were from the sunny 
lands of the Mediterranean, and all were so ill prepared and 
ill clothed for the unaccustomed severity of a more rigorous 
climate that they were crazed by the biting cold. 

The rearguard marched over the fallen in the road, but 
never failed to stop long enough to strip the bodies of any 
warm garments they chanced to wear. A survivor tells of 
his surprise when one whom he supposed to be dead pleaded 
to be left in possession of a fur coat, and he reports his own 
grim reply, "All right, I can wait." 

Humanity survived in some breasts. "When a vivandiere 
was delivered of a child in the snow, the colonel of her regi- 
ment and the surgeon did everything possible for her com- 
fort. With her infant wrapped in sheepskins in her arms, she 
was placed on the colonel 's horse when the march was resumed 
the next morning. Nevertheless, as the regiment halted a few 
days later, and the mother prepared to nurse her baby, she 
cried out in anguish on discovering that the child was frozen. 
Her husband, the barber of the regiment, sadly took the poor, 



354 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

lifeless little thing from the breast of the weeping vivandiere, 
kissed it and laid it in its tomb of snow. 

Another vivandiere, who had given two children to the 
snow, is portrayed sitting by the road as the troops stumble 
by, holding in her lap the head of her dying husband while her 
one remaining child is bending over them, her tears freezing 
as they fall on the father's face. The dog of a regiment, who 
had followed it from Spain to Vienna and to Moscow, unable 
longer because of frozen feet, to keep step with the soldiers 
was carried on the shoulders of one of them until he died of 
the cold. The humble loyalty of some Germans to their boy 
prince was not lost. To shield the twenty-year-old princeling 
from a bitter night while he slept in his cloak, they stood 
around him in a solid wall, where three-fourths of them froze 
and died that he might live. 

When the wretched remnant of the army came again in 
sight of the towers of the ruined city of Smolensk, the Em- 
peror himself was afoot, plodding through the snow with an 
iron-pointed staff. In the three weeks since he left Moscow, 
200 guns had been abandoned along the lane of death. Worse 
still, thousands of the weakened men had found their muskets 
too heavy to be carried and had thrown them away. The 
force was now reduced to less than 50,000 soldiers in widely 
separated columns, and many of these were without weapons. 
In the twelve weeks that had passed since Napoleon first 
stood before the walls of Smolensk, in that period of less than 
three months, he had lost 135,000 men. 

As he paused there on the banks of the Dneiper, the Rus- 
sians were closing in upon him from all directions and threat- 
ening every avenue of escape. He dared not wait long enough 
to reunite and reorganise his slender, scattered forces, and he 
fled for safety with only 15,000 men, leaving his sick behind 
him. 

When he came to Krasnoi, almost the last town in White 
Russia, he halted for the belated divisions of Davout, Eugene, 
and Ney, before plunging into the Lithuanian wilds. With 
his 15,000 half-starved veterans, he turned in desperation 
upon his 80,000 pursuers and cowed them with the dread of 



THE GREAT TRAGEDY 355 

his name. Marshal Davout succeeded in joining him, and 
Prince Eugene got around the enemy and effected a junction 
with the Emperor, but with the loss of nearly half of his 
6000 men in twenty-four hours. 

Davout and Eugene having caught up with him at Krasnoi, 
Napoleon pressed on without waiting for Ney. As he sped 
onward, he had small hope of ever again seeing "the bravest 
of the brave" among his marshals. "I have," he sighed, 
"more than 80,000,000 francs in the cellars of the Tuileries, 
and I would gladly give them all for the ransom of Marshal 
Ney." 

The marshal ransomed himself with his courage. But when, 
at last, he overtook the Emperor, only 900 haggard faces 
appeared in the wasted ranks of the column of 6000 warriors 
who had left Smolensk four days before. Only those 900 
were left of the corps of 39,000 men with which Ney had en- 
tered upon the Russian campaign. In a few days 200 more 
would rest in the snows. 

As Napoleon in his flight with the mockery of his Grand 
Army approached the Beresina river, the sun, which no longer 
shone for him as at Austerlitz, thawed the marshes and broke 
up the ice in the stream. With only 30,000 men, he must 
bridge and cross a river, while 65,000 Russians pressed be- 
hind him, 30,000 bore down upon him from the north and 
34,000 threatened him from the south. Yet he had only to 
turn and growl at them to throw them back in such panic as 
to spread demoralisation throughout all their armies and ren- 
der comparatively harmless a force more than four times 
greater than his own. 

Unluckily he had burned his pontoon train as a useless in- 
cumbrance only to find that the Russians had destroyed the 
bridge by which he intended to pass over the Beresina. "Is 
it written there," he bitterly exclaimed as he looked up to the 
heavens, ' ' that we shall do nothing but make mistakes ? ' ' 

For the lack of better material, he tore down houses and 
built his bridges of such sticks as he could pick up. In the 
eagerness of his soldiers to put the river between them and the 
Russians, they fought among themselves in the desire of all 



356 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

to take a hand in the work of bridging it. They leaped into 
the icy waters up to their shoulders and laboured there until 
two bridges spanned the little stream no wider than a narrow 
city street. But not more than five in 100 of those devoted 
bridge builders survived the exposure and returned to their 
homes. 

Napoleon and the Old Guard at once crossed to the home- 
ward bank. There, however, they had to make an all-day 
fight to beat off a Russian army which had come to dispute 
their passage. The weather was growing colder and guards- 
men went about the camp calling for dry firewood to keep the 
shivering monarch warm in his hovel on the river bank. 
Though themselves chilled to the marrow, half dead grenadiers 
took fagots from their own scanty piles and said, "Give these 
to the Emperor." 

On the other shore, the army and its hangers on, deprived 
of Napoleon's care, became an unmanageable mob. Not that 
they stampeded in their haste to escape over the river. On 
the contrary, the bridges remained idle all night long, while 
frostbitten men and women persisted in staying near the 
bridge heads in the warmth of the burning wagons that had 
been devoted to destruction. Thousands of others, stupefied 
by hunger and benumbed by cold, sank into a sluggish indif- 
ference to their fate, from which they could not be awakened 
in the morning until they saw the spears of the Cossacks 
bearing down upon them and the shells of the Russian artil- 
lery raining from the heights behind them. 

Then they rose in a wild panic and madly fought with one 
another at the entrance to the bridges, which were quickly 
choked with horses, wagons, and guns, men, women, and chil- 
dren. Many were struck down in the heedless rush and many 
others were pushed into the river. One of the bridges at last 
sank beneath its burden and filled the stream with a scream- 
ing, struggling, drowning mass. Many w T ere still on the re- 
maining bridge when the Russians advanced to seize it and 
the French fired it, giving their own people to the flames or 
the waters to save themselves from pursuit. Other thousands 
were still on the shore, ready for the Cossack knife. 



THE GREAT TRAGEDY 357 

Perhaps only 12,000 or 13,000 had crossed the Beresina, no 
more in number than they who were found asleep on the bank 
when the Russian spring came and lifted their mantle of snow. 
But flood and flame never told how many thousands of lives 
they took between them. 

"Food!" "Food!" "Food!" That was the cry Napo- 
leon sent on ahead, as he marched his tatterdemalions toward 
Vilna, where, five months before, the earth had trembled be- 
neath the tread of his hundreds of thousands of troops. He 
himself was not going to Vilna, but was about to shake off 
his nightmare army. A month had passed since a courier, 
riding at a furious pace, came to him on the march to Smo- 
lensk and brought the report of a movement to seize the gov- 
ernment at Paris. A demented man, who had broken away 
from his keepers, had been able to communicate to others his 
delusion that the Emperor was dead, place himself in com- 
mand of 600 of the Guard and cast into prison Savary, the 
minister of police, along with the prefect of police. If a crazy 
man, armed with a crazy rumour, could do that, Napoleon 
naturally wondered what would become of his throne if he 
were not seated upon it, when Paris should hear that the 
Grand Army was dead. 

He rode into the little village of Smorgoni, therefore, with 
a determination to free himself from the wreckage and race 
to his capital ahead of the news of his disaster. Closeting 
himself at Smorgoni, he sat down and wrote the last bulletin 
of the campaign, blaming everything on the Russian winter 
and on "men whom nature had not fashioned stoutly enough 
to be above all the chances of fate and fortune." As if to 
draw a contrast between himself and the Half Million who 
had fallen, he added, "the health of His Majesty has never 
been better." That closing line, however, obviously had the 
less sinister motive of assuring the restless revolutionists of 
France that the eagle was not winged. 

Finally having committed to King Murat the horrid skele- 
ton of the greatest military body that ever had marched to 
war in modern times, Napoleon stole away by night in an open 
sleigh with Duroc and Caulaincourt, Roustan and a Polish 



358 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

guide. It was not glorious, but it was the only thing to do. 
Some one else could lead the staggering Ten Thousand, but he 
alone, once he was in Paris, could stamp his foot and raise up 
new legions. 

Other detachments came and joined the little column from 
Moscow, but only to swell its list of deaths to 20,000 in the 
short distance between Smorgoni and Vilna. The feasting 
in the latter city proved to be as fatal as the fasting had been 
on the march from Moscow. 

As the flight to Kovno began there were only 9000 under 
arms. "When Ney, bringing up the rear, rode into that town 
on the Niemen, the gateway which in June had opened so in- 
vitingly to the grave, he found 2000 soldiers lying drunk in 
the streets. Others, hardly less delirious from privation, 
crouched about the fires and doggedly refused to take the few 
steps remaining to complete their long retreat out of Russia. 

The Cossacks soon swooping down upon the place, sent 
panic into the feeble ranks of the little rear guard. Ney, 
however, seized a musket and laying low the boldest, fought on 
until he had only thirty men in his redoubt, but he had re- 
pelled his assailants. The next morning at dawn, he crossed 
the Niemen, the last to quit Russian soil. 

The pursuing Cossacks galloped beyond their national 
boundary, and the miserable fragment of the Grand Army 
broke into atoms as it dispersed in the sheltering woods of 
East Prussia. A spectral band of 400 of the Old Guard 
stalked into Konigsberg behind Murat, who, remembering 
that he as well as Napoleon had a throne to save, dropped the 
command and hastened away to Naples. The ever faithful 
Prince Eugene then picked up such pieces as he could, and 
welding them together in the warmth of his own loyalty to 
the Empire, backed across Germany until he stood on the 
shore of the Elbe. 

The Russian campaign was at an end. Again the Czar 
was dancing at Vilna. 

The cost of the expedition in human life was so enormous 
that there is no agreement as to the total. By one calcula- 
tion, 630,000 men entered Russia and 60,000 returned. For 



THE GREAT TRAGEDY 359 

although only 6000 escaped over the Niemen with their arms, 
there were small supporting columns in Poland which were 
not engaged in the deadly advance and retreat, and which 
suffered much less. The Russians boasted that they took 
200,000 prisoners, but how many of these died in captivity or 
remained after the war to disappear into the Russian nation 
no one knows. 

Another computation gives 125,000 as the number slain in 
battle, 132,000 as dying of privation, and leaves to doubt the 
fate of the captured, while 10,000 is given as the total of the 
French who escaped with their lives. Napoleon himself ad- 
mitted a loss of 300,000 men. Of the more than 1200 
guns Napoleon hurled into the frightful abyss, at least 
a full thousand were lost, together with countless standards 
and eagles. The crew went down but the officers were saved, 
not a marshal, not a man above the rank of general of division 
having been sacrificed. 

The aggregate of the Russian losses is unknown. But the 
armies of the Czar suffered only less than Napoleon's. They 
lost 50,000 between Moscow and Krasnoi, and the estimated 
total for the entire campaign of six months runs as high as 
150,000. 

Fleeing over the snow night and day from the scene of the 
tragedy, the Emperor surprised his ambassador at Warsaw by 
his sudden and unheralded appearance in the Polish capital. 
The inn at which he stayed under an assumed name is now the 
Hotel English, and Napoleonic pictures hang on the walls 
which echoed his memorable exclamation as he compared the 
pomp of June with the plight of December, "It is but a step 
from the sublime to the ridiculous. ' ' 

A knock at the door of the French embassy at Dresden was 
the first announcement of his return to the Saxon capital, 
which had last seen him with the monarchs of Europe at his 
feet. Now he came in the night, without trumpeters or even 
servants, and borrowed $800 and six shirts for the rest of his 
homeward flight. 

At Weimar, the sleighing grew poor and he changed to a 
carriage. This time, however, he did not venture into the 



360 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

castle, as after the Battle of Jena, but excused himself to the 
Duchess of Weimar on the ground that he was not present- 
able. 

For three weeks Paris had heard not a word from the Em- 
peror or the army until the appearance one morning in 
December of the last bulletin penned at Smorgoni. The next 
night at eleven-thirty, after Marie Louise had gone to sleep, 
Napoleon, disguised in furs beyond her ready recognition, 
burst in upon the Empress. 

In the morning, Paris awoke to the startling report that in- 
stead of being in Russia, battling with snowdrifts, the Em- 
peror was safe in his palace and would hold a levee at nine. 
In her surprise, the excited city all but forgot to ask him what 
had become of the Grand Army, and France promptly rose 
at his call to face allied Europe once more. 



E 



CHAPTER XLII 

THE RISING OF THE PEOPLES 

1813 AGE 43 

MBOLDENED by the calamity that had overwhelmed 
, Napoleon and his army in the Russian campaign, the 
^ people of Germany rose in the summer of 1813 and fell 
upon him. The leader of that great popular uprising was 
none other than Alexander I, the autocrat of all the Russias, 
who presented himself as the deliverer of the nations from the 
tyranny of the French. 

Napoleon could not believe that the continent would trust 
itself to such a leadership. He never ceased to admonish the 
countries of the west to beware of the Russian peril, which he 
himself had always viewed with dread. No doubt he was 
honestly persuaded that he was defending civilisation when 
he marshalled the hosts of twenty nations and led them against 
the Czar, and he was equally sincere at St. Helena when he 
raised the warning cry, "In ten years, Europe can be all 
Cossack or all republican." 

Diplomacy as well as politics makes strange bedfellows, 
however, and in 1914, England and France appeared as the 
allies of the Slav against the Teuton. Napoleon failed to fore- 
see the development of the great Germanic Empire which 
would avenge Jena at Sedan ; challenge England on the sea 
and divide the west in a political and economic rivalry. Thus 
in the War of the Nations, France and England joined with 
Russia against the Germans just as 100 years ago Germany 
and England joined with her against the French. 

All of Napoleon's fellow sovereigns shared in some degree 
his distrust of Russia, when in the spring of 1813, the aveng- 
ing Czar entered Germany in pursuit of the wreck of the re- 

361 



362 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

treating Grand Army. "Napoleon or I, I or Napoleon," 
Alexander had exclaimed. "We cannot reign side by "side." 
The earth was not large enough to be divided with the Corsi- 
can. 

The subjugated monarchs of the west drew back from the 
offer of the Czar to be their defender. They seemed for a 
time to prefer even the chains of the French and the ills they 
had, rather than fly to others unknown which the Slavs might 
bring upon them. The Emperor of Austria and the King of 
Prussia equally dreaded the thirst of the Russian bear for 
the waters of the Hellespont and the Vistula. 

While the crowned heads of Europe hesitated between a 
choice of evils, their subjects hailed Alexander as a saviour 
and they welcomed as friends and brothers the wild horse- 
men from the Valley of the Don as they loped across the 
German plains clear to the gates of Hamburg. The German 
people sprang to arms and, throwing off the galling yoke of 
the French, drew around the hated conqueror of Jena, a 
guerdon of fire and iron. 

Napoleon might still be the ally of kings but he was no 
longer the son of the Revolution and the hope and champion 
of mankind. On the contrary, he saw the inspiring title of 
Liberator, which he wore in his magic youth, caught up by a 
Russian Czar and flaunted on the banners of the Cossacks, 
who snatched from him the watchwords of patriotism and 
liberty which in other days had fired his legion with an irre- 
sistible passion. Patriots were no longer behind him but 
were in front of him and they challenged him whichever way 
he turned, whether in Spain, in Russia or in Germany. 

Byron and Tom Moore sing the unhappy lot of the eagle 
which saw his own feathers plucked to wing the darts that 
brought him to his doom. Such was the fate of Napoleon. 

In vain he appealed to his new allies, the kings and princes, 
to help him beat back the tide of popular feeling. Fatuously 
imagining that the bond of blood was as sacred and strong 
among the Hapsburgs as the Corsicans, he looked upon Marie 
Louise and her baby as hostages of peace between Austria and 
France. 



THE RISING OF THE PEOPLES 363 

While he was relying on a young woman and a teething 
child, a poor little German girl, without a crown and without 
a title, influenced the destinies of nations far more than the 
daughter and the grandson of the Hapsburgs. When that 
simple fraulein sold her finger rings for $1.50 and gave the 
money for the triumph of her fatherland, the loyal women of 
Germany caught the infection of her spirit of sacrifice and 
heaped upon the altar of patriotism not only their rings but 
all their gold and silver as well. As many as 150,000 German 
frauen, we are told, pulled the wedding rings off their fingers 
and dumped them in the mint, gladly taking and proudly 
wearing in exchange iron rings inscribed, ''Gold I gave for 
iron. ' ' 

Although Goethe might smile and say to the Germans, 
"Shake your chains, if you will; Napoleon is too strong for 
you; you will not break them," simpler minds were braver 
and truer. The spirit of Queen Louise walked abroad ; songs 
of freedom burst upon the land and the church, the school 
and the home were leagued for German independence. 

When the patriot politicians had induced Frederick Wil- 
liam to leave Berlin, which was still only a French garrison, 
the Prussian King was quickly swept away on the tide of 
patriotism. Austria, however, declared an armed neutrality, 
but one of her ablest statesmen, Count Stadion, only foretold 
the truth when he said, ' ' We are no longer master of our own 
affairs; the tide of events will carry us along." 

The Empire and the church still were at war. The Em- 
peror Francis having appealed to his son-in-law to deal more 
gently with the Pope, Napoleon had ordered Pius VII to be 
brought from Savona to Fontainebleau in 1812. There, in the 
great palace, the prisoner was installed in spacious apartments, 
with carriages and servants at his command. But Pius de- 
clined the favours of his captor and dwelt like a hermit in the 
sumptuous chateau. 

Napoleon never was so futile against any other antagonist 
as against the gentle shepherd of the flock of Rome, whose 
Empire, unarmed and invisible, calmly withstood the assaults 
of the Great Captain. "Alexander declared himself the son 



364 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OP NAPOLEON 

of Jupiter, and in my time," he complained, "I find a priest 
more powerful than I am!" 

When the year 1813 opened, France was a nation disarmed 
and worse than that. Her best fighting men and her war 
material were either buried beneath the Russian snows or 
were hotly enlisted in the Spanish campaign against the allied 
Spaniards and English under Wellington. Two decades of 
warfare had drained the country of its military resources 
and left it in a state of exhaustion which many biologists 
contend is reflected to this day in the national birth rate. 

The land had been combed again and again, and now it 
had to be combed with fine teeth. The sons of the well-to-do 
who had been avoiding service by paying from $2500 to $5000 
for substitutes were raked in along with those who had drawn 
lucky numbers in the yearly draft. For three years the an- 
nual conscription had been anticipated to meet the demands 
of the Spanish, Wagram and Russian campaigns, and the 
youth of the nation had been called to the colours a year in 
advance of the normal time. Now another forced loan was 
extorted from the future, and the conscripts of 1814 were 
snatched from their mothers in the beginning of 1813. 

The adult male population of the country had been win- 
nowed so often that hardly anything remained but the chaff. 
The physical standards of recruiting were lowered to catch all 
who were big enough to carry a musket. .Many of the recruits 
were so small or young that Savary. the minister of police, 
objected to their drilling before the jeering crowds of cynical 
Paris. 

The equine race had suffered with the human from the 
desolation of the wars. The country was without horses old 
and strong enough to draw the artillery, and that branch was 
seriously crippled by animals too young and small for the 
load. 

In the face of all difficulties, Napoleon had an army of more 
than 200,000 soldiers in Germany, with 600 cannon, when he 
left Paris for the front at one o'clock of an April morning. 
As he was leaving, he invested the Empress with the regency 
and bade good-bye to the little King of Rome, who in vain had 



THE RISING OF THE PEOPLES 365 

been lisping the prayer for peace which his governess taught 
him. 

In less than four months since his return from Russia the 
Emperor had built up a new army on the wreck of the Grand 
Army. It is well to remember that he had to do it without 
telegraphs or telephones, without railways or automobiles, 
without even a press to aid him in rallying and enrolling the 
people and in organising and supplying his forces. 

Thanks to his own titanic labours, he was enabled to cross 
the Rhine with nearly twice as many men as the Russians 
and the Prussians had been able to assemble against him. 
Few, however, had ever smelled powder and most of them had 
to be taught to load a musket. The majority of their cor- 
porals, sergeants, lieutenants and captains also were strangers 
to war. The veteran officers of the lower grades as well as the 
veterans in the ranks lay beneath the wheat fields of the 
Danube, in the valleys and on the Sierras of Spain, or on 
the Russian steppes. Moreover, the very soul of the army 
was dead and its commander no longer wore the aureole of 
victory. 

The foe, on the other hand, not only had stolen away the 
spirit of the Grand Army, but many of the officers of the 
Prussian contingent also had borrowed leaves from the mas- 
ter's book of recipes for making war and they understood the 
Napoleonic method as well as his own marshals. They had 
not served for nothing a seven years' apprenticeship since 
Jena. 

Although Napoleon had sternly limited the army of con- 
quered Prussia to 42,000 men, its staff had been smart enough 
to give vacations by the wholesale and call up new men to sub- 
stitute, thus making the little organisation a training school 
for many more than the stipulated number. At the out- 
break of the war, the King had recalled General Blucher from 
a banishment which he had incurred by his fiery rebellion 
against the French domination, and had placed him in com- 
mand. 

Like most of the patriot leaders who had aroused Prussia, 
Blucher was not a Prussian but a native of a minor German 



366 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

state. An old man of seventy-two, his flaming hatred of 
Napoleon filled him with the ardour of youth and, although 
an illiterate, hard-drinking, loud-swearing, tumultuous char- 
acter, his natural fighting qualities made up for his lack of 
technical knowledge. 

The Allies, however, suffered from a divided command. 
The Slavs would not tolerate a Teuton over them and the 
Russians had not yet developed a high order of generalship 
among themselves. Kutusof had died just as he finished his 
long chase of Napoleon, and the Russian Czar was the real 
commander of his contingent in the allied army in Germany. 
Alexander had no special military training, hut he was served 
by a fairly sound common sense. 

The Russians and Prussians undertook first of all to wrest 
Saxony from Napoleon's control, and that kingdom bore the 
brunt of the entire war of 1813. For six months the Saxon 
plains were trampled by the armies of all the nations of Eu- 
rope ; humble homes were laid waste, and the sickle of Death 
reaped in the fields where the toiling peasants had sown, 
while in the desperation of a loser, the discarded favourite 
gambled with fate. For a half year the hurricane of war 
swept back and forth over a battle ground ninety miles long 
and forty miles wide. 

The storm first broke in full fury on an afternoon in early 
May at Liitzen, near where Gustavus Adolphus found his 
grave and where the land rolls away to the mountains of Bo- 
hemia. At the end of a bloody half-day struggle between 
180,000 men, there came that inevitable hour of weariness and 
irresolution for which Napoleon always waited and watched 
in the ebb and flow of the battle tide. Then he called out, 
"Eighty guns, Drouot!" The guns, being quickly parked, 
opened their mouths and poured forth a torrent of iron and 
fire which tore through the enemy's line and put the Allies to 
flight. War was terribly simple with Napoleon. 

After the battle was won and finished, a Prussian cavalry 
brigade made a spurt that surprised and broke up the Em- 
peror's own escort. In the confusion and the darkness, he 
was separated even from his staff, and after the flurry was 



THE RISING OF THE PEOPLES 367 

over Lad to gallop about to find his aides. He had already 
begun to display that heedlessness of peril which characterised 
his last campaigns, when, seeming to challenge the fickle god- 
dess to do her worst, his grey coat was carelessly offered in 
nearly every engagement as a target for the slings and arrows 
that outrageous fortune was raining upon his empire. His 
suite often could not avoid the risks he ran, and Bessieres, 
commander of the Guard, was killed on the eve of the fight 
at Liitzen, the second marshal of the Empire to fall, Lannes 
having been the first. 

As the Battle of Liitzen was fought near the last battle 
ground of Gustavus Adolphus, so the Battle of Bautzen was 
waged three weeks afterward close by a field already made 
memorable by Frederick the Great. In its gentle descent 
from the mountainous frontier of Bohemia, through the fa- 
mous Spreewald and on to Berlin, the River Spree washes 
no walls more picturesque than those of the little city of 
Bautzen, whose quaint mediaeval towers stood witness to the 
deadly grapple of more than 200,000 men as they swirled for 
two days about the hillocks that rise from the countryside. 

In the fighting on the first day, Napoleon drove the Czar 
and the Allies out of the town, and that night the camp fires 
of his army formed a flaming line nine miles long. At five 
in the morning of the second day, he was in the saddle and 
riding among his troops, and at three he announced to them 
that the battle was won. The chimes were sounding five in 
the belfry of the cathedral of Bautzen, where for nearly 
300 years now Catholics and Protestants have used the same 
altar, when the Czar ordered the defeated army of the alliance 
to retreat through the Silesian gorges. 

The losses of both sides together aggregated not far from 
40,000. Napoleon had won another victory but it was as 
costly and bootless as that of Liitzen. For through a misun- 
derstanding of orders on the part of Ney, the Russians and 
Prussians, who could and should have been cut off and 
smashed, made good their escape, leaving not a button or a 
nail in the hands of the victor. 

The Emperor hastened after the fleeing Allies the next day 



368 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

in an effort to retrieve the mistake and destroy the retreating 
army. While he was in hot pursuit, a Russian gun was 
trained upon him and a ball hissed in his ear as it tore past 
him to lay low Duroc, the grand marshal of the palace, who 
was riding a few yards behind him. 

Napoleon turned to see his devoted servitor writhing in 
pain from a mortal and hideous wound. The order was given 
to cease firing, and the Emperor, returning to his camp, seated 
himself in the midst of the Guard where he surrendered to his 
emotions of grief over the loss of an inseparable companion 
in all the campaigns of the Empire. No other man but Ber- 
thier had been so closely associated with him, and Berthier 
sometimes quarrelled with him. But Duroc, he used to say, 
"loves me as a dog loves his master." And faithful even in 
the grave, he lies at the gate of his master's tomb in the In- 
valides. 

When Napoleon resumed the chase in the morning the Rus- 
sians and Prussians continued to flee before him and to quar- 
rel among themselves. He had been in the field only five 
weeks and had won two great battles, swept back the enemy 
from the Saale to the Oder, a distance of more than 
200 miles, and filled the counsels of the Allies with dis- 
sension. 

Although he had 200,000 men at his command against not 
more than 130,000, still without horses for his cavalry, he 
despaired of overwhelming this smaller force. He had found 
it harder to get horses than men — or boys. He was ready, 
therefore, to welcome a pause in the campaign. Moreover, he 
was fast driving his foes upon the Austrian frontier and into 
the arms of his father-in-law, who, he feared, thus would be 
drawn into the alliance against him. 

In the presence of that delicate situation he did a thing 
alien thitherto to Napoleonic warfare — he dropped his hands 
and stopped fighting. Accepting the mediation of Austria, 
he entered into an armistice for two and a half months with 
the Czar and the King of Prussia, a truce that was to prove 
fatal to his cause. 



CHAPTER XLIII 
THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 

1813 AGE 43-44 

NAPOLEON, the Czar and the King of Prussia called the 
truce, only for the purpose of resuming the struggle 
with heavier forces. Although a peace congress was 
to assemble at Prague, peace was not the object of the armis- 
tice on either side. 

Napoleon needed horses and his allied foes equally needed 
human reinforcements. Above all, both sides wished to enter 
into negotiations with Austria, which had adopted a policy 
of armed neutrality. 

The matrimonial alliance of the Bonapartes and the Haps- 
burgs was cast in the scale and weighed when Metternich 
came to Dresden to hold an interview that has become his^ 
toric. Napoleon had taken up his residence in the Marcolini 
palace, then a beautiful villa in the suburbs of Dresden, but 
now converted and enlarged into a great hospital. In the 
long, stony corridors and spacious salons, where the imperial 
Corsican diffused his favourite perfume of eau de cologne, the 
air is heavy to-day with the pungent odour of disinfectants. 
The walls, which now echo the plaintive murmurs of the suf- 
fering, once resounded with the voices of marshals and cour- 
tiers and of the celebrated actors of the Comedie Francaise, 
who came on from Paris to amuse the Emperor in the lull of 
warfare. 

One room only in all the palace hospital remains as it was. 
It has been preserved in memory of the day when, within its 
precincts, a mighty empire tossed in its crisis, while Napoleon 
wrestled with Metternich in a vain effort to keep Austria from 
taking up arms against him. 

369 



370 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

For nine hours they grappled and struggled in that room, 
where the Emperor exclaimed, ' ' Ah, Metternich ! How much 
has England given you to play this part against me?" The 
same dragons still contort themselves on the inlaid floor; the 
same desk continues to stand in the corner, and the windows 
look out upon the fountains in the same park, where the King 
of Saxony and the imperial dignitaries anxiously waited for 
the momentous decision, but where in this time the con- 
valescent patients take the healing air. And hold ! Is not 
that the veritable door knob, which Napoleon gripped at dusk, 
when the long interview was at an end and when the depart- 
ing Metternich, as his memoirs would have us believe, pro- 
nounced the doom of the Empire: "You are a ruined man, 
Sire. I had a presentiment of it when I came here; now I 
am sure of it ! " 

Metternich offered him peace if he would only content him- 
self with France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy, and the Em- 
peror's counsellors implored him to accept those apparently 
liberal terms, which would have left him a far wider do- 
minion than any other French monarch ever had possessed. 
Already he had lost Spain, and even while he was at Dresden, 
he received the news of the flight of Joseph Bonaparte from 
that country. Jerome Bonaparte's kingdom of Westphalia 
was fast being engulfed in the tide of German patriotism, and 
Louis had thrown away his crown of Holland. Furthermore, 
the vassal states in the Confederation of the Rhine were aban- 
doning Napoleon day by day. 

Metternich 's liberality, however, was somewhat illusory, for 
both sides really were bent on fighting to a finish. As al- 
ways, England was the backbone and the purse pocket of the 
alliance. She did not wish to make peace until France was 
shut up within the boundaries that confined her in the igno- 
minious days of Louis XV. In twenty years of nearly con- 
tinuous warfare, England had been Napoleon's most constant 
foe. Yet he had not seen an English soldier. The British 
contingent in Spain under Wellington had brought confusion 
upon his marshals, but England had fought the master him- 
self with gold rather than lead. British, agents were in 



THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 371 

every camp of the Allies, and were the paymasters of the 
allied sovereigns. 

Napoleon made a pretence of yielding almost everything, 
but he was still insisting on keeping Hamburg, Bremen and 
one or two other dots on the map of Germany, when the bells 
of Prague struck the midnight hour on the 10th of August. 
Instantly bonfires flamed up from the hilltops clear to the 
Silesian frontier, as a signal that the armistice was over. 

The truce of ten weeks had been far more profitable to the 
Allies than to Napoleon. Not only had Austria been drawn 
to their side, but Bernadotte, Crown Prince of Sweden, with 
a small contingent of Swedes generously subsidised by Eng- 
land, also had come to join in the attack upon the tricolour 
flag, beneath whose favouring folds he had risen from the 
peasantry to royalty. Moreover, the Russians and Prussians 
themselves had brought up two new men for every recruit 
that Napoleon had been able to call to his standard. Against 
his 350,000 troops and 1200 guns at the reopening of the war, 
the Allies had no less than a full half million actually in the 
field with 1400 cannon, and they had also enormous reserves. 
The total of all Napoleon's forces everywhere was less than 
600,000, nearly 180,000 of whom were wasting themselves in 
Spain and Italy and in German fortresses, while his foes had 
more than one million men enrolled beneath their banners. 

Confidence reigned in the allied headquarters, where, 
around the avenging Czar, a motley group had been drawn 
together from the ends of the earth with no other motive in 
common than their envy or hatred of the colossus, who had so 
long bestrode the narrow world. There was Frederick Wil- 
liam of Prussia, who saw at last his chance to break his chains 
and revenge himself for Jena and Tilsit. There were Eng- 
lish representatives, who had camped on Napoleon's trail for 
twenty years, and among them was Col. Hudson Lowe, 
ready to bind the fallen giant and drag him to his rock of 
captivity. 

Irreconcilable emigres, whom the usurper in his glory had 
been unable to lure from their Bourbon allegiance, were gath- 
ered like huntsmen when the game is run to cover. One of 



372 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

them was his old seat mate in the military school of Paris, 
where three boys sat in a row — Phelippeaux, Picot de Peccaduc, 
and Napoleon Bonaparte — and the first named and the last 
kicked at each other behind the desk until the second, who sat 
between, had to move his wounded legs from the firing line. 
Phelippeaux settled his score at the gate of Acre, where he 
mounted the guns on the wall for the Turks and stopped his 
schoolroom enemy in his march to win an empire in the east. 
Now Picot was on the staff of the Austrian commander, Prince 
Schwarzenberg, where, after twenty-five years, he was fondly 
hoping to avenge his shins. 

The ubiquitous Pozzi di Borgo, that Corsican Nemesis, was 
there of course, panting with an unslaked thirst for revenge, 
and eager to carry to the bitter end a neighbourhood quarrel 
begun in the streets of Ajaccio. "Napoleon needed only one 
man to have become the master of the world and I am that 
man." Such was Pozzo's boast in all the after years. 

By the side of that relentless vendettist was a man whose 
hate was younger but no smaller. This was Moreau, the victor 
in the Battle of Ilohenlinden. Moreau 's wife and mother-in- 
law being from Martinique, had rebelled against the exaltation 
of their sister islander, Josephine, and estranged the general 
from Napoleon, who banished him to America at the time of 
llic Bourbon plot and the shooting of the Duke d'Enghien. 
There is a tradition that President Madison offered the refugee 
the command of the American army in the War of 1812. 
After an exile of more than eight years on the banks of the 
Delaware, he was tempted by an emissary of the Czar to re- 
turn to Europe, and join in bringing down the eagle. 

The Czar had drawn one man to his side out of the very 
camp of Napoleon. That was General Jomini, the Swiss 
banker who had divined and published the wizard's tricks of 
military magic but had grown dissatisfied with his rewards as 
a member of Marshal Ney 's staff and had changed flags in the 
course of the armistice. 

One alone in the crowd at the allied headquarters could 
not frankly share the general rejoicing over the prospect of 
upsetting the Napoleonic throne. Francis of Austria was 



THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 373 

unable to forget that his daughter was sitting upon it and his 
grandson was playing about its steps. A father's love and a 
monarch's ambition were tearing the Austrian Emperor's 
emotions between them as he moved among the confident plot- 
ters for the overthrow of his son-in-law. He drew back from 
the Czar's table when he saw Jomini seated at it. "I very- 
well understand that it is necessary to avail ourselves of spies 
and traitors, but is it necessary to break bread with them?" 
Francis inquired. 

Among all the cooks at the allied headquarters, there was 
no chef. The sovereigns were too jealous and suspicious 
to choose one of themselves to be commander-in-chief, and 
there was no general of the first rank among the Russians, 
Prussians and Austrians. Besides, the oil and water of Slav 
and Teuton persistently refused to mix. 

The greatest general of modern times, therefore, must be 
beaten by an army without a general, and the allied forces 
were divided into three armies under independent com- 
manders. There was, however, a common plan of campaign, 
chiefly the work of Moreau. Its salient principle was to keep 
out of Napoleon's way and whip his marshals. 

The Emperor, never suspecting the scheme to refuse him a 
battle, made a lunge at Blueher on his front as soon as the 
war was on again. The old Prussian only drew back into the 
Silesian gorges, whereupon the allied sovereigns themselves 
began to move up into Saxony. This menace behind him 
obliged Napoleon to hasten back to Dresden, whither he flew 
with truly Napoleonic swiftness, marching the Guard through 
120 miles of mud in four days. 

The sovereigns had 100,000 men in hand when they arrived 
on the heights of Dresden. Although they knew that Napo- 
leon was absent and that the defences were manned by hardly 
20,000 men, they flinched from the attack and decided to 
wait for the remaining half of their army to come up. 
While they waited, the Emperor raced into the city and took 
his stand at the head of the bridge over the Elbe to stir his 
tired and sleepy men when they crossed the river. As their 
cheers of "Vive l'Empereur" mounted in waves to the hills 



374 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

behind the town, the camp of the Allies was filled with dis- 
may. They knew now that they had the lion in front of 
them. 

Napoleonic battlefields generally are fair to see. None is 
fairer than the field of Dresden, for it is all but overgrown 
to-day with the streets and homes and lawns of that fairest 
of the fair among the beautiful cities of Germany. In the 
battle time, the Saxon capital was not the imposing city of 
more than half a million people that it is to-day, but only a 
big town of 30,000. The village lanes and peasant fields, in 
which the armies of all the nations fought for two days, have 
given way to the broad thoroughfares and handsome resi- 
dences of the modern city. The villas and pensions and 
schools of the Anglo-American colony to-day are set almost 
in the centre of the battle ground, where the Cossack spears 
and the French lances clashed in furious combat, while the 
trees were shattered and the sward was crimsoned in that 
lovely old park, the Grosser Garten. 

Napoleon's battle line is now lost in the expanded business 
section, where the clamour of arms has been succeeded by the 
no less clamorous street cars and automobiles. The red 
tide flowed almost to the walls of the royal palace, where the 
Emperor was a guest of the King and where in these days the 
tourists linger in the apartments he occupied. 

The battle broke at four in the afternoon, when the 
sovereigns from their hill hurled their Russians, Prussians 
and Austrians upon the redoubts of the French. The storm 
of fire did not subside until midnight. But that first day was 
only a draw. 

As early as six the next morning, Napoleon was out on 
the firing line again. He stood in his tent door before a huge 
bonfire while he dried his clothes which were soaking with the 
rain that descended in floods. After the mingled storms of 
fire and water had beaten upon the two armies for hours, he 
delivered the decisive stroke in the afternoon, when he sent 
Murat and 25,000 men with seventy-five guns to hurl them- 
selves upon the left flank of the enemy. The horsemen slashed 
their way with lance and sword and rode down the allied 



THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 375 

infantry, whose flintlocks were so wet they could not fire. 
The entire wing was swept away and 10,000 of the foe stacked 
their useless weapons and surrendered. 

That was the finishing blow which spread consternation 
through the ranks of the Allies and won the battle. In the 
two days of fighting the sovereigns had lost 15,000 men killed 
and wounded and 20,000 taken prisoners, while Napoleon's loss 
was 10,000. 

The allied army, however, was only beaten ; it was not 
broken. And a battle is not fought to conquer a few acres of 
ground but to conquer an army. 

Alas! the victor of Dresden, tired, wet, and bedraggled, 
stopped to dry and rest himself rather than complete his vic- 
tory. With his cocked hat dissolved into a shapeless mass and 
hanging over his ears, he mounted his horse at four o'clock 
and trotted into the town. The water dripped from the 
skirts and sleeves of his grey coat as he entered the palace, 
where the King of Saxony embraced him and congratulated 
him on one of the most notable successes of his career. He 
had brought up 110,000 almost exhausted troops, crossed a 
river in the face of 180,000 enemies and put them to flight. 

While he slept, the Allies made good their escape. The 
rumble of their wagons on retreat was heard through the 
night, and when, at dawn, he rode to the hill where the 
sovereigns had stood the day before, their hosts had vanished 
toward the Bohemian mountains. Only a dog had been left 
behind, and his collar, inscribed "I am General Moreau's 
dog," is preserved among the keepsakes of Dresden. 

Napoleon himself had all but pointed the gun that brought 
down the dog's master. When, in the midst of the battle, he 
had seen a party of horsemen on the hill, he remarked, "There 
must be some little generals there, ' ' and he ordered his battery 
to fire upon them. Had he been facing his old enemy on the 
duelling ground, he could not have drawn a deadlier aim than 
the battery drew on Moreau, who was with the Czar in the 
centre of the group. The returned exile was even then giving 
Alexander some military advice, when the shot struck him and 
shattered both legs. 



376 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The wounded general in a jolting vehicle bore with calm 
fortitude the agony of the retreat, and persisted until the end 
in debating the future course of the campaign. Only the day 
before he died, he wrote to his wife: "At the Battle of Dres- 
den, three days ago, I had both legs carried off by a cannon 
ball. That scoundrel Bonaparte is always fortunate." 

Seldom does a soldier who dies in arms against his flag and 
his country receive a monument. Not only was Moreau's 
body sent to Petrograd by the Czar's orders and buried with 
honours in the Roman Catholic church at the Russian capital, 
but his memory was honoured also on the spot where he 
fell. 

There is a cenotaph on the hill where he stood beside Alex- 
ander, when one of Napoleon's gunners brought him down. 
Over it the green ivy climbs to decorate the sculptured helmet 
and sabre on the top. Three oaks mount guard about the 
memorial stone and all around an oat field smiles above the 
battle-furrowed ground. Across Moreaustrasse and down in 
the valley, the cabbages in the little gardens of the city poor 
grow on the graves of the fallen foemen. Seemingly hardly 
more than a mile away, the castle tower and the church belfry 
of the King's palace by the Elbe rise in the midst of the city, 
whose murmur ascends to-day even as the cheers for Napo- 
leon rolled up the height on an August morning and spread 
despair among the Allies. 

The victory of Dresden was set at naught in the first month 
of the new campaign. Napoleon's lieutenants lost 150,000 
men and 300 guns, while 50,000 sick and wounded crowded his 
hospitals. Those heavy losses could be repaired only by bor- 
rowing from the future, and the Emperor called to his colours 
160,000 boys, who were not due to give military service until 
1815. 

While he continued week after week to cling to the worth- 
less ground he had won at Dresden, the three allied armies 
moved to unite behind him in the neighbourhood of Leipsic. 
Thither at last he betook himself in the confidence that he 
could whip them one by one as they came up. 

He was no longer choosing battlefields. On the contrary, 



THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 377 

he was accepting the choice of the enemy. Having morally 
planted himself on a negative, the denial of the German peo- 
ple to govern themselves, he inevitably passed over to the 
defensive in his military operations. 

It is an interesting coincidence that the two great battles of 
the war of 1813 were fought under the walls of the two great 
cities of Saxony. Not that either was much of a city in the 
battle year, for Leipsic with its nearly 600,000 popu- 
lation now, was then only such a town as Dresden. Its 
30,000 people were huddled within an old encircling wall, 
hardly more than two miles round, when for three days in 
mid-October, 2000 cannon roared and half a million men 
fought the Battle of the Nations at its gates. 

On a hill at the very edge of the twentieth century Leipsic, 
only a short car ride from the city centre, rises a huge moun- 
tain of concrete, a German pyramid, which in 1913, on the 
centenary of the momentous struggle, the Kaiser William II, 
great grandson of King Frederick William, dedicated in the 
presence of the representatives of the German states and of 
Austria, Russia and Sweden. 

Although the pious motto, "God with Us," in letters six 
feet high, is carved above the door, this memorial of Napo- 
leon's overthrow in Germany, with its sculptured mob of 
pagan deities, offers a suggestive contrast to the memorial 
of his repulse from Russia, the Church of Our Saviour in 
Moscow. And here, too, on the battlefield of the nations, the 
Russians have reared a church in memory of their dead and 
of their victory. But around the lofty cupola of the German 
monument at Leipsic, bronzed giants mount guard with their 
war clubs, and a gigantic effigy of the German Michael grimly 
stands sentinel at the portal in the midst of a terrifying group 
of furies who hold aloft flaming torches of destruction, while 
within, the Fates glower from the walls of the crypt. This 
surely is no cote for the dove of peace, but a massive temple 
of war, the tabernacle of the sword and the mailed fist. 

That giant cairn of German patriotism is heaped upon the 
very mound where Napoleon was overwhelmed, but a little 
commemorative stone almost hidden among the shrubs and 



378 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

flowers, marks more precisely the position of the man of 
destiny when his star shot across the firmament in that October 
evening and vanished behind the hills of Thuringia. 
On top of this lesser monument lies a three-cornered hat cut in 
marble, while a marble sword rests on a marble pillow. Only 
these lines from Exodus are chiselled on the face of the 
stone : 



THE LORD 

IS A MAN OF WAR 

THE LORD 

IS HIS NAME 



Simply that and nothing more. But the story is told plainly 
enough by the cocked hat and the sword, and the exultant 
words spoken by Moses when the Lord cast into the Red Sea 
the chariots and host and chosen captains of Pharaoh and the 
depths had covered them. The name of the Corsican Pharaoh 
does not appear in the inscription. It would be superfluous. 

As the visitor walks around the balcony of the great monu- 
ment, he sees spread beneath his gaze, the panorama of the 
entire battlefield of the nations. As at Dresden, so at Leipsic 
Napoleon occupied the town, and when the Allies came to 
drive him out of it they assailed the city on three sides at once. 
He himself, however, emerged from the southern gate and 
faced his foes on the field about the monument. 

The numbers were fairly even in that opening battle, but 
for the first time in his life, Napoleon failed to win a fight be- 
tween equal forces. As night fell on the field, and while a 
pitiless rain beat in the upturned faces of the slain, the Em- 
peror sat in his tent in the brickyard close to the monument, 
facing the fact that Germany was lost to him. At his order, 
the bells of Leipsic had rung for his victory, but that was as 
sounding brass. His German allies, caught in the tide of na- 
tionality, had been falling away from him day by day. The 
Westphalians and the Saxons had been going over to the other 



THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 379 

side for weeks. Now the Bavarians had heard the call of the 
fatherland and joined the army of liberation. 

Well might the baffled warrior in the brickyard cry out in 
bitter despair: "Ah! give me back the old soldiers of 
Italy!" He might better still have cried out for the lost 
soul of that victorious army and its conquering watchwords: 
1 ' Liberty ! Equality ! Fraternity ! ' ' 

The next day was Sunday and as dismal as his fortunes. 
While the allied sovereigns were bringing up huge reinforce- 
ments and combining to overwhelm him, he had no reserves to 
call on. He could only draw in his wet, hungry, and dis- 
pirited troops closer to the walls of Leipsic in preparation for 
one more throw of the dice. 

Monday dawned in a sombre mood, but soon a brilliant sun 
burst upon the field where the races and nations of Europe 
were gathered to wrest from the hands of Napoleon the 
sceptre of empire. Even Asia had been drawn into the strife, 
for the Bashkirs of Siberia were there with their bows and 
arrows. From the Hill of the Monarchs, the Czar, the Aus- 
trian Emperor and the Prussian King sent forward an army 
of 300,000. Formed like an enormous pair of open shears, 
they closed in upon the 150,000 troops who upheld the eagles 
of France in lines that fell away from the hill of the monu- 
ment, where Napoleon alternately sat and stood beside a ruined 
windmill. 

All day a storm of steel and lead beat against his lines in the 
struggle to hurl his army back into the narrow, tangled streets 
of Leipsic. He breasted the furious onslaught of the 300,000 
until night came and until nearly all his cannon balls were 
gone. His artillery had fired no less than 220,000 rounds in 
two days. 

As darkness stole over the field, he fell asleep on his camp 
stool in the awful silence that succeeded the fury of battle. 
While his generals stood by awaiting his orders for the in- 
evitable retreat, a stray round shot fell in his bivouac fire and 
awakened him. For a moment he looked about in drowsy 
bewilderment and then pronounced the word which once had 
no place in his lexicon. 



380 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The only escape for the beaten army was through the un- 
lighted streets of the town, over two rivers and thence by a 
single causeway across wide marshy flats. That one avenue 
to safety was quickly crowded with soldiers, wagons and guns. 
The cavalry rode down the infantry, and the wounded, lying 
about the streets and squares, were heedlessly trampled upon 
in the confusion and the darkness. At daybreak, the Allies 
opened their eyes on the rear of the retreating army, and they 
rose to pursue the fleeing troops through the gates, while 
their artillery rained their shells upon the roofs of Leipsic. 

Napoleon had passed a night of horror at the Hotel de 
Prusse, whose doors are still open. Although the Czar slept 
in the hotel the next night, it is the room of the conquered, 
not the conqueror, which has been set apart through the gen- 
erations, and the "Napoleon Zimmer" remains to this day 
the special boast and exhibit of the landlord. 

It was about nine in the morning when the Emperor came 
out of the Prusse and joined in the retreat. It was an even 
year that very morning since he had taken flight from Mos- 
cow. Now as then he had to fight his way through another 
mob of fleeing soldiers; but he whistled his war song as he 
went. 

After escaping from the town, he came to a village near by 
and lay down to sleep. He had passed three almost sleepless 
nights. Now that the strain was over, nature would be put 
off no longer. 

While he slept, the loud report of an explosion startled him. 
It was the signal that his catastrophe had received its corona- 
tion. 

A French corporal had been left in charge of a mine under 
the bridge over the Elster river, with instructions to destroy 
the structure when his comrades were all safely across. But 
losing his head in his terror of some yelling, charging Prus- 
sians, he had blown up the bridge and left from 10,000 to 15,- 
000 French, with hundreds of cannons and wagons, stranded 
on the shore, ready for the eager hands of the captors. 

Many leaped into the river to swim their way to the other 
bank, but most of them only dragged one another beneath the 



THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS 381 

water. Marshal Macdonald succeeded in crossing, but 
Poniatowski, the knightly Pole, who had won a marshal's 
baton only two days before, was among the drowned. Now, 
when the Elster is but a mere canal flowing through the pres- 
ent day city, one who stands by the monument which marks 
the place where the Prince's body was recovered, can hardly 
believe that the narrow, placid stream could have been so 
fatal a barrier to the soldiers of Napoleon. 

With that disaster, the sum of the Emperor's losses around 
Leipsic amounted to not less than 80,000, together with 28 
flags and eagles and 325 guns. The allied loss was not far 
from 50,000. 

When at last, Napoleon had put the Rhine behind him at 
Mayence, he had only 50,000 or 60,000 men under arms. Of 
the rest of the nearly 500,000, whom he had rallied to his 
standard for the war, perhaps half were captives or besieged 
in their fortresses. The remainder were dead of wounds and 
disease. Thousands had perished on the retreat from the cold 
and from hunger and fever. In Russia and Germany to- 
gether above 800,000 men had been lost in sixteen months. 

For the second time in a year France was disarmed. 



CHAPTER XLIV 
AT BAY 

AGE 44 

WITHOUT guns and without ammunition, without 
money and without horses, without forts and with- 
out men, Napoleon, in the opening weeks of the year 
1814, turned at bay to face a world in arms and defend France 
and his crown against a mighty host of Germans, Russians 
and Austrians swarming on the banks of the Rhine. 

France lay bleeding, exhausted and despondent. For 
twenty-two years she had been giving her sons to war and 
grieving over her unreturning brave, sunk to rest unknelled 
and uncoffined beneath the palm and the pine, until their un- 
buried bones half encircled the earth, from the swamps of 
Santo Domingo to the mountains of Galilee, from the salt 
mounds of Cadiz to the melancholy wastes of Russia. Year 
after year she had gathered her martial brood and hurled 
army after army at the walls of her foes. Now, when her 
own gates were assailed, they were without defenders. 

The Emperor called upon the nation to rise and repel the 
invader from the frontier, which no foe had passed in the 
twenty years since he trained his cannon on the British in 
the harbour of Toulon. The France, however, that had risen 
in her wonderful strength the last time a German had dared 
cross the Rhine was the France of the Revolution, which Na- 
poleon himself had slain on the steps of St. Roch and in the 
Orangery at St. Cloud. ''We must pull on the boots of 1793," 
he cried. But the spirit of '93 was dead and even he could 
not call it back. 

The nation had been reduced to one man and he alone re- 
mained to face allied Europe. How he was overwhelmed, it is 

382 



AT BAY 383 

easy enough to imagine. How he breasted the tide week after 
week and beat it back time and again ever remains an amazing 
chapter in history. 

With the armies of thirty nations at his frontier and a 
British army under Wellington actually on the soil of south- 
ern France, he found his treasury, his arsenals and his bar- 
racks empty. All the hundreds of millions of dollars which 
he had collected in tribute from conquered states were swal- 
lowed up in the disasters in Spain, Russia and Germany. For 
he had supported his armies almost entirely from levies on 
other countries. 

Yet he had not spent quite all he had taken in. In the 
splendour of imperial power, he never lost the homely 
virtue of thrift, and every year he laid by against a rainy 
day nearly $3,000,000. Those savings from the annual ap- 
propriation he hoarded under the Tuileries, and now that the 
rainy day had come, he went down into the cellar and took 
the money for his campaign. 

Alas ! He had not saved any of the human millions whom 
the people had intrusted to him. Had he been as parsimoni- 
ous with blood as with gold it would have served him in good 
stead now. Almost all the arm-bearing population had been 
spent, however, and for five years he had been running into 
debt and drawing the conscripts to his colours a year and two 
years before the appointed, time. He had been so improvi- 
dent as not to leave enough of the human crop for seed. For 
two decades the most stalwart candidates for paternity had 
been carried off to die in the wars or drag themselves home 
physical and moral wrecks. 

Hard as it was to gather even a few thousand men and 
boys of all ages and all sizes, it was harder still to find horses 
for them to ride and good muskets to put in their untrained 
hands. 

There were virtually no forts, for Napoleon had been the 
destroyer not the builder of citadels, which he had captured 
only to dismantle. He had conquered Europe in open fields 
and generally had disdained even to throw up breastworks. 
His only castle had been his bayonets and his batteries, while 



384 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

his frontier had been as far from the boundaries of France as 
the Vistula and the Tiber. 

Now, however, he no longer held anything beyond the 
Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine. Spain and Germany had 
driven him out. The Austrians had invaded Italy and were 
hastily snatching from him the first of his fruits of victory, 
while hemming in his viceroy at Milan. At the same time 
Murat 's childish and futile perfidy was fast losing the rest of 
the Italian peninsula. Vainly striving, by allaying himself 
with the enemy, to save his royal house of cards from the 
impending crash, the King of Naples seized Rome and marched 
northward, and Napoleon, who had counted on having the 
French soldiers in Italy join him in defence of France, had 
to march them against his foolish and ungrateful brother-in- 
law. 

Still another blow was dealt the Emperor in his extremity 
by the hand of another of his old marshals, when Bernadotte 
took from him the last of his allies. The Crown Prince of 
Sweden, forehanded in picking up the wreckage, moved upon 
Denmark, which was compelled to renounce its alliance with 
France and cede Norway to Sweden, and Heligoland to Eng- 
land. 

The ill-wind that was driving the Empire on the rocks, how- 
ever, blew open the prison door of Pope Pins VII. Napoleon 
no sooner saw Rome in the hands of Murat than he started 
the prisoner of Fontainebleau on his homeward journey to the 
Eternal City, that he "might burst on that place like a clap 
of thunder." Another prisoner also profited by the misfor- 
tunes of the Empire, Ferdinand being liberated from his cap- 
tivity of nearly six years to return to Spain and claim his 
crown. Thus Napoleon threw over the ballast from his sink- 
ing ship, but too late to keep it afloat. 

The Allies concentrated behind the Rhine in early Decem- 
ber for an immediate invasion of France. They had a grand 
total of 880,000 troops but they did not choose to wait to as- 
semble those great masses. They chose instead to open a win- 
ter campaign with 300,000 men, while the Emperor yet had 
no more than 50,000 troops at the French border. 



AT BAY 385 

With the exception of Switzerland there were then no neu- 
tral, buffer states between Germany and France. Holland 
and Belgium had been swallowed up in the Empire, whose 
frontier included not only everything on the left bank of the 
Rhine but also ran beyond the Elbe. 

Biilow entered Holland, where the Dutch people rose to 
welcome him, while Bliicher came down the Moselle, and ad- 
vanced through Lorraine, driving Victor from Nancy and 
easily capturing Toul. The main army, under Schwarzen- 
berg, and accompanied by the Czar, the Emperor of Austria 
and the King of Prussia, did not scruple to ignore Swiss neu- 
trality. Crossing the Rhine between Basle and Schaffhau- 
sen, its advance, in overwhelming numbers, was a military 
promenade. The French helplessly fell back from town to 
town and from river to river, while the invading forces swept 
forward until they stood at the borders of Burgundy and 
Champagne, where they looked down the valleys of the Seine 
and the Marne toward Paris. 

Thus the Cossacks were in the heart of eastern France be- 
fore Napoleon could piece together the semblance of an army 
of defence. He did not leave Paris, indeed, until nearly a 
month had passed since the Allies first crossed his frontier. 

Realising the desperate chances of his situation, he again in- 
vested Marie Louise with the regency, and chose Joseph Bona- 
parte, the dethroned King of Spain, as her chief adviser. 
Assembling the officers of the national guard, in the great hall 
where he had seen Louis XVI compelled to put on the red 
cap of liberty nearly twenty-two years before, he held his 
last levee with the Empress. 

The courtiers all came, hiding their fears behind their 
smiles, or their treacheries behind their fawnings. When the 
Emperor entered, the Empress was with him, and between 
them was the King of Rome, his yellow curls falling over the 
shoulders of the blue coat of his uniform of the national guard. 
That simple picture of father and mother and son touched 
the heart and kindled a devotion beyond any words however 
eloquent. 

After the three had walked directly to the large group of 



386 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

officers, the Emperor said to them: "Gentlemen. I am about 
to go to the army, but I intrust to you what I hold dearest in 
the world — my wife and son. Let there be no political di- 
visions." Lifting up his son, he carried him among the 
officers and courtiers, who cheered ami wept while they 
pledged their lives for the protection of the Empress and the 
King of Rome. 

In a few hours more Napoleon held his boy in his arms and 
looked into his blue eyes for the last time. For the last time, 
too, he folded Marie Louise in his embrace as he was depart- 
ing at three o'clock on a dreary January morning to battle 
with her father. 

The drama of Napoleon's life from prologue to epilogue 
was highly theatrical. It became sheer melodrama when 
the curtain rose upon him standing at bay amid the charred 
ruins of Brienne. Driven from Cairo and .Moscow, Rome and 
Vienna, .Madrid and Berlin, hunted out of Egypt and Syria 
and Russia. Spain and Austria and Poland, Italy and Ger- 
many and Holland, chased from river to river across the face 
of Europe, he took refuge in the Tillage of his boyhood days, 
and from behind its garden walls he turned upon the avenging 
nations. Russian Cossacks and Prussian Uhlans, the soldiers 
of all the lands which his Legions had overrun, were upon him 
and the village lanes resounded with the yells of the eager 
pack. 

Some Uhlans almost rode him down in a neighbouring town 
and had nearly surrounded him, when a French brigade came 
up just in time to cut him out. After they were beaten off, 
he saw the priest of the place, standing by the roadside. Rec- 
ognising him as one of his teachers in the friars' school, he 
exclaimed: "What! It is you, my dear master! I don't 
need to ask if you know this neighbourhood?" 

The father assured him, "Sire, I could find my way every- 
where blindfolded." Roustan thereupon was ordered to dis- 
mount and give his horse to the clerical guide, who led the 
way toward Brienne. 

It was dusk when Napoleon approached the town, riding 
beside his old teacher. Blucher had occupied the village and 



AT BAY 387 

was eating his supper in the big chateau when a hail of shots 
suddenly descended and the French cavalry dashed up to 
the front gate. The old Prussian marshal did not stop to 
finish his meal, and was fortunate to be able to make his escape 
by a back way. He rallied his forces out on the snow-covered 
fields and blazed at the town until midnight, but the schoolboy 
of Brienne had come into his own and held it. 

Seated in the chateau he heard again the never forgotten 
tones of the bell in the old church tower at the foot of the hill. 
Once more he slept in the bed ever after cherished by the 
counts of Brienne, which he had first occupied when he came 
ten years before to let the villagers see the crown the little 
Corsican had won. That crown, beside which all other crowns 
had paled and before which the nations had bowed in subjec- 
tion, that crown which millions of bayonets had guarded, now 
could command no more than 100,000 ill-armed, ill-clad, ill-fed 
and ill-trained defenders against the over-whelming hosts of 
the Romanoffs, the Hapsburgs, and the Hohenzollerns, banded 
together to snatch it from his brow. 

Bliicher was determined to retake Brienne, and on the third 
day he returned to the attack. Napoleon went forth to meet 
him about the village of La Rothiere, which lies across the 
prairie in view of the old belfry. It was another snow battle, 
for the combat was waged in the midst of a cold and heavy 
snowstorm; but unlike the memorable snow battle in the 
schoolyard, an Empire was the prize at stake now. 

And Napoleon lost. After sacrificing a full tenth of his 
little army, he retreated under cover of darkness to another 
night in the chateau. It was a night filled with alarms. At 
four in the morning, he hurriedly rode away from Brienne 
forever, to fall back across one more river in a retreat which 
really began at Moscow. 

Hastily crossing the Aube, he ran into Troyes, that pic- 
turesque old town of narrow, winding streets and timbered 
houses. There, in the ancient capital of Champagne, he stood 
by the shore of the last river at his command, the Seine, and 
only 100 miles from Paris. But in its dread of the wounded 
lion, the Army of the Sovereigns halted behind the Aube. In- 



388 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

stead of falling upon him in crushing force, the Allies di- 
vided, Bliicher moving up to the Marne, with the intention 
of marching to Paris down the valley of that river, while the 
main army undertook to advance on the capital by the valley 
of the Seine. 

Meanwhile the diplomats of the belligerent nations had as- 
sembled in a congress at Chatillon and raised the price of 
peace. At Prague they offered to let Napoleon keep Belgium, 
Holland, and Italy; at Frankfurt they subtracted Italy and 
Holland, and now, at Chatillon, they withdrew Belgium, which 
France had taken from Austria in the Revolution, before Na- 
poleon came to power. This latest demand infuriated him. 
"Unheard-of disasters may have snatched from me the prom- 
ise to renounce my own conquests," he said, "but give up 
those made before me? Never! God save me from that dis- 
grace!" 

England was determined, however, to remove the entire 
Netherlands from the control of a great rival power like 
France. For she has ever regarded the coast of Holland and 
Belgium as her landing place on the continent. 

The Czar, implacable as the English, was eager to enter 
Paris and destroy the Bonaparte throne. The Austria ns, how- 
ever, having already retaken virtually everything he had cap- 
tured from them, were less eager for the pursuit. 

With allied Europe only five or six marches from Paris, 
Napoleon could not bend his pride and bring himself to accept 
any bounds to his sovereignty. Like a high-powered locomo- 
tive descending from a great height at top speed, he could 
not stop until he was thrown and ditched. His fall must 
equal his rise, his misfortunes must be in proportion to his 
fortunes. 

Two days after his arrival in Troyes, the Emperor rose from 
his maps and exclaimed, "I am going to beat Bliicher!" 
Starting at once on a swift cross-country march, he ordered 
the detachment remaining behind to maintain a noisy show 
of aggressiveness toward Schwarzenberg, shout "Vive l'Em- 
pereur" and make that cautious commander feel that he still 
had Napoleon in front of him. 



AT BAY - 389 

While both Schwarzenberg and Bliicher supposed him still 
at Troyes, while the former was slowly manoeuvring with ex- 
treme prudence and the latter was flattering himself he had 
stolen a march on the Great Captain, he fell like a cloudless 
thunderbolt upon the carelessly strung-out column of Bliicher. 
For one swift week, the Emperor was again the Little Corporal 
of Montenotte, of Lodi, of Castiglione and of Rivoli. 

Catching up some veteran dragoons of the Spanish cam- 
paign, who had galloped across France "without unbridling," 
he drove them on without giving them a breathing time. He 
marched his conscripts all night and kept them fighting all 
day, and like a whirlwind tore through wondering villages, 
where he never before had been seen. Loading his infantry 
into the carts of the peasantry, he carried his little band over 
slushy roads sixty miles in thirty-six hours. His appearance 
thrilled alike the populace and the troops, and we are told that 
under the inspiration of his presence "the cavalry attacks 
were fiercer," and that even "the fire of the cannon was 
heavier." 

First striking one of Bliicher 's divisions at Champaubert, 
only 1500 of its 5000 men escaped him. Next he fought 
what is called the Battle of Montrnirail and routed two other 
divisions. He pounced upon the marshal himself the follow- 
ing day and hurled him from Chateau Thierry. In four 
whirling days, his 30,000 men smashed to pieces an army of 
more than 50,000 when its van was within fifty or sixty miles 
of Paris. Bliicher found himself driven back in disorder to 
Chalons sur Marne, more than 100 miles from his goal, and 
with a loss of nearly 20,000 men. 

Turning in a flash from Bliicher, Napoleon smote and 
paralysed the left wing of the Army of the Sovereigns when 
it was only twelve miles or a day's march from Fontainebleau. 
Throwing himself upon it at Montereau, which snuggles in the 
elbow formed by the Yonne and the Seine, he dealt a blow 
that sent Schwarzenberg staggering back to the Aube. 

In the rejuvenation of victory, he became once more the 
young artilleryman and pointed the cannon that tore the 
enemy's front. The gunners protested against their Em- 



390 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

peror's exposure to peril, but he reassured them: "Ah! my 
friends, never fear; the ball is not yet cast that will kill me." 

As he moved forward from Montereau, an army that out- 
numbered his five to two timidly retired before him and he 
declared to his minister of war that he would have wiped it out 
but for his lack of twenty skiffs with which to cross the Seine 
in pursuit. "It was not fifty boats that I needed — only 
twenty!" 

While the Emperor was pausing again at Troyes, he heard 
that Bliicher had organised a new army of 50,000 men for 
a fresh start toward Paris. Resolved to break him up once 
more, he left the Seine, crossed the Maine and the Aisne, and 
fell upon the old hussar at Craone, a crow flight of eighty 
miles north of Troyes. The fortress of Soissons, however, 
had fallen, and Bliicher, having been joined by Biilow's army 
from Holland, had in hand no less than 110,000 men against 
45,000 French. In vain the Emperor flung himself against 
that wall of steel and then turned back to open a new cam- 
paign of intimidation against Schwarzenberg. 

When he thought that commander was retiring before him, 
as usual, the Army of the Sovereigns turned upon him at 
A iris sur Aube, where with only 20,000 men he was sur- 
rounded by 80,000 and had no other means of escape than by 
a narrow bridge. Yet for two hours those 80,000 stood silent, 
motionless, and irresolute on the heights of the Aube before 
the mere handful on the river bank. The Emperor was lucky 
in the end to get away with no greater loss than 5000 men; 
but that was one-fourth of his strength. 

Both Bliicher and Schwarzenberg having beaten him off, he 
saw in his hand but one more card to play. If he could no 
longer block the road to Paris, he would try to cut in behind 
the invaders, arouse the population of Alsace and Lorraine 
and bring the Allies back to defend their lines of communica- 
tion. With only 10,000 men, he started for the Rhine, but he 
declared "soon I shall have 100,000." 

As he sped eastward, however, and Schwarzenberg was 
turning to pursue him, two couriers were captured by the 
Cossacks and two letters taken from them. By that mis- 



AT BAY 391 

chance of the road, the ruse was exposed. One letter was 
from Savary to the Emperor telling him that France could 
no longer resist and the other was from the Emperor to Marie 
Louise, divulging his purpose to draw the Allies away from 
Paris. "With those tell-tale letters in his hands, the Czar in- 
sisted that Schwarzenberg and Blueher should at once join 
forces in an advance on the capital, and only a small force was 
sent to the rear to delude Napoleon with the idea that the 
Allies were following him. 

After the Emperor had fenced for two or three days with 
the decoy division, some bulletins of the Allies were found in 
the pockets of captured soldiers, which announced that the 
allied army was paying no attention to him, but was making 
straight for Paris. Then the true situation dawned upon his 
understanding. 

He was at St. Dizier when the scales fell from his eyes and 
he saw the peril of his capital, 150 miles away. He turned 
at once to run a race across France in an effort to get ahead 
of the invaders and, sword in hand, take his place at the city 
gate. 



CHAPTER XLV 
THE FIRST ABDICATION 

1814 AGE 44 

NAPOLEON was yet 100 miles away and furiously gal- 
loping through Champagne when, on the 29th of 
March, 1 S 1 4, the Allies, the first alien invaders in 
350 years to come in sight of the capital of France, saw from 
Clichy the setting sun gild the spires of Paris. 

From a tower of Notre Dame, the Parisians could see the 
Russians and Germans and Austrians rolling toward their 
walls like a tidal wave, and could see the smoke curling above 
the camp fires of the enemy. The French had conquered the 
capitals of Europe, but at last retribution awaited them at the 
gates of their own capital, where the eager Cossacks echoed 
the cry of a hetman : "Ah, Father Paris! Thou shalt now 
pay for Mother Moscow!" 

The beautiful capital was adorned with the treasures of 
conquered lands and the monuments of military triumph. No 
less than 1200 melted cannon, which Napoleon had captured 
from Russia and Austria, were in the lofty Vendome column. 
But there were no guns to mount on the city wall. Paris, 
like all France, was exhausted by victory and bankrupted by 
glory. 

Already Marie Louise and her three-year-old son had left 
the Tuileries. The Emperor had repeatedly commanded that 
his wife and boy should leave before the city fell. "I would 
rather my son should have his throat cut than that he should 
be brought up in Vienna as an Austrian prince," he wrote 
King Joseph. As for himself, he plainly warned his brother 
that when Paris fell he would have ceased to live. 

When the batteries of the Allies began to knock at 
the gates on the 30th of March, there were only seven old 

392 



THE FIRST ABDICATION 393 

cannon with which, to hold those natural defences of the 
city, the heights of Montmartre. Marshals Marmont, Mor- 
tier and Moncey gathered a few defenders, some of them 
only high school boys, and offered a gallant but vain show of 
resistance. At four in the afternoon the struggle was over 
and a trumpeter rode out with a flag of truce. By the gate 
of La Villette, not far from the Gare du Nord to-day, a 
parley was held as the sun was sinking behind Montmartre, 
and it was agreed that the little army of defence should 
evacuate the city in the night and that the Allies should make 
their entry in the morning. 

For three days Napoleon had been racing back from St. 
Dizier. Leaving his exhausted soldiers behind him on the 
third day, he jumped into a light wicker carriage with Caulain- 
court, while Drouot and Flahault, Gourgaud and Lefebre fol- 
lowed in similar conveyances. At Sens he heard that the 
enemy was before Paris; at Fontainebleau that the Empress 
and the King of Rome had left the city ; at Essonnes that the 
battle was on — and he still twenty miles away ! 

It was ten o'clock at night when he dashed into the village 
of Cour de France and stopped for his last change of horses. 
That Gethsemane of the Empire no longer is Cour de France, 
but is now called Fromanteau. In all else, however, with its 
stone cottages bordering the high road between Paris and 
Fontainebleau, it is much the same simple hamlet that it was 
in the days when the Emperor and his court, in a cloud of 
dust, passed through on their imperial progresses between the 
capital and the great chateau, and as it was that night of 
the 30th of March, 1814, when, in an agony of rage and 
despair, he paced its only street. 

At the southern entrance of the village there rise by the 
road two time-scarred fountains, the fountains of Juvisy, as 
they are called in honour of the municipality of which Cour de 
France is but a small part. The women and children of the 
neighbourhood, who still come to hold their buckets and pitch- 
ers under the flowing streams, are reminded by the inscrip- 
tions that they are indebted for the refreshing bounty of the 
fountains to King Louis XV, and for their restoration to 



394 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

"Napoleon le Grand." It was the irony of fortune that by 
those fountains of Juvisy, "Napoleon le Grand" should have 
received the bitterest draft that until then ever had been 
pressed to his lips. 

While the impatient Emperor waited there for fresh horses 
to speed him on the last stage of his race for empire, a cavalry 
command came toward him from Paris. "What! you, Bel- 
liard!" he exclaimed as he recognised that general. "What 
does this mean ? You here with your cavalry ? Where is the 
army?" The general detailed to the Emperor the dire events 
of that fateful clay when Paris and the Empire fell. 

The Allies were not to enter the city until the morning? 
The Emperor knit his brow. He could be in Paris in an 
hour! "There is still time!" he cried to Caulaincourt. "My 
carriage ! You hear what I say ? I mean to go to Paris ! My 
carriage! Bring me my carriage!" 

Mote retreating troops came, bringing the same despairing 
story to the Emperor where he sat on the base of one of the 
fountains, supporting his throbbing head in his hands. Soon 
he started up from his roadside revery and strode through the 
village and to the brow of the hill. Standing there, he saw the 
bivouac fires of allied Europe drawn in a cordon about the 
surrendered city. Caulaincourt inducing him to turn his back 
on the painful spectacle, he retired to the Inn of Cour de 
France. 

That humble wayside tavern is gone now, and on its site 
are the villa and astronomical observatory of Camille Flam- 
marion, whose most powerful lens, however, cannot catch a 
gleam of the star which Napoleon saw leading him on to 
glory and to disaster. 

No sooner had the Emperor entered the inn than he spread 
his maps and fell into a soliloquy: "Alexander will hold a 
review to-morrow; he will have half his army on the right 
bank of the Seine and the other half on the left. If I only 
had my army, I could crush them all." 

Again he looked up, with a new hope flaming in his eye. 
"I've got them! I've got them!" he shouted. "God has 



THE FIRST ABDICATION 395 

placed them in my hands ! ' ' He would go to Fontainebleau, 
assemble his army and drive the aliens out of his capital. 

Caulaincourt begged him to accept the terms offered by the 
congress of Chatillon, but which, of course, were no longer 
open to him. Still he would not consider the suggestion of 
his minister. Although he started him to Paris with instruc- 
tions to negotiate with the allied sovereigns, he warned him, 
' ' No shameful peace ! ' ' Even with Paris fallen, he would not 
give up Antwerp ! ' ' France would be nothing without 
Antwerp ! " he persisted. 

When Caulaincourt had departed on his futile mission, the 
maps were rolled up, and the Emperor, worn out by his three- 
day race against fate, fell asleep in the tavern chair. It was 
nature's truce. Oblivious to his misfortunes he sat there un- 
til four o'clock in the morning, when he re-entered his wicker 
carriage and drove back to Fontainebleau. 

At eleven o'clock that morning, a troop of Cossacks, fol- 
lowed by the Czar and the King of Prussia, passed under the 
arch of Louis XIV at the Porte St. Martin in Paris. As the 
victorious spearmen from the Don and the conquering mon- 
archs pranced along the boulevards, welcoming cheers rang 
from the crowded windows and roofs. * ' Long live the Czar ! ' ' 
"Long live the King of Prussia!" "Long live our liberators !" 
"Long live King Louis XVIII!" "Down with the tyrant!" 

All the better dressed people had brought out and donned 
the white cockade, and the lilies of the Bourbons fell like snow- 
flakes in the pathway of the conquerors. Paris had ex- 
hausted her passion in the Reign of Terror, and her popula- 
tion as a whole had been indifferent lookers-on at the rise 
and fall of each successive regime. She only shrugged her 
shoulders and smiled as a mere claque acclaimed the Empire, 
the marriage of Marie Louise and the birth of the King of 
Rome. Now the downfall of the Emperor was applauded by 
but a mere claque of time servers and Bourbon nobles. That 
rejoicing faction was under the leadership of Talleyrand, the 
bishop who had blessed the pikes of the Revolution, who be- 
came a prince of the Empire, and who was now waiting in 



396 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

the doorway of the great palace which Napoleon gave him to 
offer its hospitality to the Czar. By his side stood Bour- 
rienne, his lips puckered to kiss the hand that had overturned 
the Empire of the old schoolmate of Brienne, of the man who 
had kept him on his payroll as minister at Hamburg even 
after he had betrayed his confidence in the post of private 
secretary. 

The compliant senate as readily voted the dethronement of 
its former master as it had registered his every will for ten 
years. Even the marshals, anxious to save their batons and 
their ducal palaces and estates, hastened to change their al- 
Legiance and pledge their BWOrdfl to the new rule. "Away 
with Bonaparte!" was the watchword now, and thus in a day 
the reign of Napoleon vanished like a dream. 

While the Parisians were cheering their conquerors and 
supple courtiers were administering on his estate. Napoleon 
was sitting in the deepening gloom that hour by hour gathered 
aliont him in the old chateau of Fontainebleau, whose shadows 
to-day, crowded though they are with the spirits of the scep- 
tred dead, still are ruled by his stubborn, unlaid ghost. It 
rises before the visitor as he enters the palace gate. lie 
sees it walking down the Horseshoe stairs on the way to the 
Elban exile and pausing to bestow a parting kiss on the im- 
perial eagle. He hears the echoed accents of the eloquent 
farewell to the Old Guard, which have been treasured these 
hundred years by the grey walls of the Court of the White 
Horse, or the Court of the Adieu, as it is sentimentally called. 

As the pilgrim passes into the chateau itself, he is led first 
of all up a flight of stairs and through the haunted apart- 
ments of Napoleon in a corner of the vast pile, where, like a 
tenant in a second story flat, the Emperor occupied only a 
half-dozen rooms in a row. The one other suite in this wing 
of the chateau faces the opposite direction and looks across 
the long corridor of Francis I, and out upon the Court of 
the Fountains. 

It was in that row of rooms, just on the other side of the 
wall from his own, that Napoleon imprisoned the Pope of 
Rome. And Pius VII had been liberated less than ten weeks, 



THE FIRST ABDICATION 397 

when the captor himself was virtually a captive in the ad- 
joining suite. Could punishment more closely tread upon 
the heels of an offence, even within the jurisdiction of poetic 
justice? 

Ney, Macdonald and Oudinot, Berthier, Marmont and Lefebre 
were at Fontainebleau, anxiously waiting for their release and 
an opportunity to make terms with the new regime. At last, 
Ney, the outspoken hussar, burst in upon the Emperor and 
boldly proclaimed their mutiny. "Sire," the marshal Prince 
of the Moskva, bluntly announced, "it is time to stop ! You 
are in the position of a man on his deathbed. You must 
make your will and abdicate in favour of the King of Rome." 

Must ! Never in the eighteen years since he took command 
of the Army of Italy had Napoleon heard that word from 
the lips of any man. In his astonishment, he appealed to his 
other princes and dukes. Their answer was made with 
Scotch candour by Marshal Macdonald, "We have had enough 
of war without kindling a civil war." 

The Emperor could not fail to see that he was helpless in 
the midst of a palace revolution. In his bewilderment, he re- 
treated from the scene, but only to surrender after a painful 
wrestle with his tumultuous impulses. Seated at the table 
which still stands in the salon of his suite, he scrawled a con- 
ditional abdication and sent Caulaincourt, Ney and Macdonald 
to Paris, charged with the duty of securing the crown to the 
King of Rome. That night, however, Marshal Marmont went 
over to the Allies, carrying his 12,000 soldiers with him, al- 
though the men rebelled and cursed their officers when, too 
late, they found they had been led into the camp of the for- 
eign invaders. This was the cruelest of all the blows which ad- 
versity was raining upon Napoleon's head. The desertion 
advertised his weakness among his marshals and emboldened 
the Allies, who no longer hesitated in their purpose to ex- 
terminate the Bonaparte dynasty and restore the Bourbons. 

Bowing to the inevitable, at last, Napoleon seated himself 
once more at the little round-top mahogany table by the 
w r indow, looking out upon the springtime bloom in the garden 
of Diana, and scratched his second and unconditional abdi- 



398 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

cation. After he had written it, he inserted the words, "for 
himself and for his heirs." With those half dozen words 
added, he had signed away not only his Empire, but also the 
birthright of his boy, whom only three years before he had 
hailed with joy as the inheritor and perpetuator of his lord- 
ship of the earth. 

The King was dead in a living death ! Long live the 
King! 

One by one the princes, the dukes, the courtiers, and even 
the servants softly tiptoed out of the chateau and ran breath- 
lessly into Paris to salute the rising sun. Ney did not return 
to say farewell to his old commander. Berthier excused him- 
self for a brief absence. "He won't come back; I tell you. 
He won't come back," the Emperor predicted, and truly. 
For he never again saw his chief of staff and his tent mate in 
all his campaigns. Savary refused to come at all. 

Roustan, who ever since he entered Napoleon's service at 
the Gate of Victory in Cairo, had slept, poniard in hand, at 
his chamber door, went to fetch his wife and children that 
they might help him share his master's exile, and the Emperor 
gave him $5000 ; but the mameluke never returned. Nor did 
the valet Constant, his pockets bulging with the Emperor's 
gold, reappear after leaving to visit his family. 

At last the companions of his glory and the partakers of his 
bounty all were gone and he was left alone in his gloom. The 
Allies had drawn their barrier of alien bayonets between him 
and his wife and son, and cut him off from his mother and 
his brothers. 

Abandoned and solitary he received his sentence of ban- 
ishment to Elba. His spirit gave way under the burdens that 
pitiless fate was heaping upon it, and he turned to the old, 
familiar companion of his melancholy moods. This dark- 
visaged mate had walked with him in his unhappy youth on 
the banks of the Rhone and the Seine. They had tramped 
together the snows of Russia, when in the retreat from Moscow 
he had armed himself with Frederick the Great's favourite 
weapon against misfortune and carried in his pocket a little 
bottle as the sure means of escape from the humiliation of 



THE FIRST ABDICATION 399 

capture. Moreover, had he not warned King Joseph in Feb- 
ruary that he would die if Paris fell ? 

Even this friend proved faithless and refused to do his bid- 
ding. His violent sickness, after taking the drug, aroused 
his attendants, and, though he begged his physician for an- 
other and more efficacious poison, he was saved from suicide. 
"Every one, everything has betrayed me," he grieved. 
"Fate has decided; I am condemned to live!" 

The Allies, after considering Corfu, Corsica and Elba, had 
chosen the latter island as the place of exile. They presented 
to Napoleon a formal treaty — the Treaty of Fontainebleau — 
which ceded to him its few square miles and recognised him 
as Emperor of the tiny realm. By this same instrument, the 
near-by Italian duchies of Parma, Placentia and Guastalla 
were bestowed upon Marie Louise, who was still to wear the 
title of Empress, while the King of Rome was to be the Duke 
of Parma. 

After Napoleon had been three weeks at Fontainebleau, the 
morning came for his departure. Four commissioners of the 
Allies, an Austrian general, an English colonel, a Prussian 
count and a Russian general, had arrived at the chateau to 
see that the treaty with the new sovereign of Elba was ful- 
filled. 

The Old Guard were drawn up in the Court of the White 
Horse for their last review When the Emperor descended the 
Horseshoe Stair. Standing by his carriage door, he bade 
them farewell in clear, ringing tones, concluding with these 
words : 

Be always faithful in the path of duty and honour. Serve with 
fidelity your new sovereign. The sweetest occupation of my life 
henceforth will be to make known to posterity all that you have 
done, and my only consolation will be to learn all that France may 
do for the glory of her name. 

You are all my children. I cannot embrace you all, but I will 
embrace you in the person of your general. 

After he had folded the general in his arms and kissed him 
on either cheek, the standard of the Guard, surmounted by 



400 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

an eagle, was brought to him, and for half a minute he held 
it to his breast. Then, lifting his hand, he said to his sobbing 
veterans, ' ' Adieu ! Keep me in your remembrance. ' ' 

The tortures he had endured at Fontainebleau, where his 
marshals and followers abandoned him, were inflicted anew 
along the route of his journey, where the people came out only 
to heap curses upon him. And this on the very road where, 
on his return from Egypt less than fifteen years before, he 
had been hailed with joyful acclamations as the liberator and 
deliverer of France ! 

After a week of ignominy, he rode into the town of Frejus, 
where, on landing from his Egyptian campaign, he had re- 
ceived a delirious greeting as the saviour of the country from 
the Allies and the Bourbons. Now as he stepped aboard the 
British warship Undaunted, he welcomed the flag of his most 
hated foe as a refuge and a protection from his own people. 

Even as the Emperor was boarding the Undaunted, the 
Empress and the King of Rome were being conducted within 
the lines of the Austrian army at Dijon. The Allies had 
taken away not only his Empire but his wife and boy as well. 
After all Marie Louise was only a trophy of victory, a hos- 
tage which Austria had given to the conqueror, and now she 
and her son were convoyed out of France along the same road 
by which the Army of the Sovereigns had marched against 
her husband. 

Death next joined the Allies and reinforced the battalions 
of sorrows that were assailing Napoleon on all sides. Jose- 
phine had not seen the Emperor since he started on his fatal 
plunge into the Russian wastes, and she no longer spoke his 
name. While he was breasting the waves of invaders in the 
valley of the Seine, she sat, listless and tearful, among her 
ladies at Malmaison, making bandages for the wounded. 

After the fall of Paris, she received a call from the Czar, 
who pledged his protection. But she was troubled less about 
herself than about her children. "Must I again see them 
wandering and destitute?" she sighed. "The thought is kill- 
ing me." Alexander's kindness aroused in her the hope that 
he might be their protector. Her cordial welcome encouraged 



THE FIRST ABDICATION 401 

him to come again and again to dine with her and stroll 
in her flowered paths. 

Russian grand dukes and German princes hastened out to 
the chateau, and even the King of Prussia brought the two 
sons of Queen Louise to see the wife of the victor of Jena 
and the tyrant of Tilsit. Only the Emperor of Austria balked 
at the suggestion that he pay his respects to Marie Louise's 
fair predecessor. But Josephine said, "Why not, indeed? 
It is not I whom he has dethroned, but his own daughter ! ' ' 

Under the patronage of the Allies, Malmaison became a 
court again. In the midst of the merry scenes, however, Jose- 
phine ailed — but it was only a cold. Her plrysician ordered 
her to bed, but she persisted in her anxious attentions to the 
new masters of her destiny and of her children's. On the 
day of her death, she insisted on being dressed in a beautiful 
robe-de-chambre, and we are told that when she welcomed her 
silent deliverer from a strange and troubled life, she lay in 
her pretty ribbons and rose satin, murmuring of "Bonaparte" 
and "Elba." 

Her body was borne into the village church of Rueil, where 
it rests beside the altar in a marble tomb erected by her 
children. Above it, her sculptured figure kneels in prayer, 
while across the church, Hortense lies in a tomb which her 
son, Napoleon III, inscribed to the "daughter and sister of 
Napoleon I." Far away in the New World, another shrine 
to the memory of Josephine rises by the shore of her native 
Martinique, where in the shade of palms at Fort de France, 
the Creole Empress stands, grasping her imperial robes with 
her right hand while her left rests upon a medallion of 
Napoleon. 



CHAPTER XL VI 

EMPEROR OF ELBA 

1814-1815 AGE 44-45 

THE monarchs of Europe who sent Napoleon to Elba 
must have been endued with a rare sense of humour. 
It is easily the best joke in history. 

What a mocking satire it was to give the Great Captain a 
little toy army and navy, crown the proud kingmaker Em- 
peror of eighty-six square miles of rocks in the midst of his 
native Mediterranean and hand him a rattle for a sceptre — 
to reduce the Empire of the mighty conqueror who had amused 
himself by dismembering kingdoms, to a tiny realm three to 
six miles wide and nineteen miles long — to leave the captor 
of the capitals of Europe in possession of only three or four 
wretched fishing villages — to make the sovereign of sovereigns 
ruler over 12,000 fishermen, miners, and goatherds! 

The mockery was only heightened by the choice of an island 
where the continent he had lost lay in full view of the exile. 
For Elba is but seven miles at the least from the mainland of 
Italy, although it is a steamer voyage of more than twelve 
miles from Piombino to Portoferrajo, the imperial capital 
which Napoleon exchanged for Paris. 

The town of Portoferrajo forms a delightful drop curtain 
for the opera bouffe, which was staged there and which en- 
joyed a continuous run of just 298 days and nights. At the 
top of the scenic picture, outlined against the turquoise sky, 
two massive but now senile forts frown down in an amusingly 
menacing way. Beneath them the stony pink little town 
hangs on for its life to the steep side of a hill, while the an- 
cient town wall zigzags down to the shore, where it thrusts a 
long, bended, protecting arm into a perfect harbour. 

402 



EMPEROR OF ELBA 403 

Out over the end of this huge crumbling wall hangs an old 
watch tower and out of a window in this sentry box idly leans 
that unfailing delight of tourist ej^es — a bersagliere, with his 
rifle over his shoulder and his bunch of long cocks' feathers 
trailing from his hat. Around the end of the wall the steamer 
glides into the snug little mole behind it and ties up at the 
stone dock. 

At the shore end of the dock rises the ancient town gate, 
through which the visitor passes at once into the very Porto- 
ferrajo, unchanging in its petrification, which was set agog 
at eight o'clock in the morning of the 3d of May, in the year 
1814, when the lookout descried a British man-of-war, under 
full sail, bearing down upon the town. 

"When Napoleon came ashore the next afternoon, the guns of 
Fort Stella — the fort of his new star — boomed over the 
crowded rooftops, and he was conducted to the cathedral, where 
he knelt in the doorway while the Te Deum was sung. Ten 
crowded years stretched between that month of May, when he 
was hailed Emperor of Elba and another May when he had 
been acclaimed Emperor of the French — the two extremes of 
imperial fortunes. 

Two of his generals had followed him into exile. General 
Bertrand was grand marshal of the palace, while the military 
governor was General Drouot, the artillery commander whose 
guns were wont to give the finishing touch to Napoleonic vic- 
tories on the battlefield. The imperial household also neces- 
sarily had its prefects of the palace, its court chaplain, its 
chamberlain, its physician, its musical director, its keeper of 
the wardrobe and its footmen and ushers. 

An army lieutenant, although a prey to violent seasickness, 
was the commander of the fleet, which consisted of the flagship 
Inconstant, a rotten old French brig of sixteen guns and sixty 
men; the Caroline, of one gun and sixteen men; the feluccas 
Abeille and Mouche, each with eight men, and the xebec 
Etoile of six guns and sixteen men. The foremost figure in 
the army was Cambronne, a gallant fire eater of the Old 
Guard, who declared that his "uniform and its very lining" 
commanded him to follow Napoleon. Arriving at Porto- 



404 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

ferrajo with 700 men of the Guard, some time after the Em- 
pire had been set up, the veterans at sight of the Emperor 
' ' wept copiously into their moustaches, ' ' as the imperial chron- 
icles record. Once the army was completely organised, it con- 
sisted of a Corsican battalion, the Polish lancers, a mameluke 
contingent, and the grenadiers and chasseurs of the Old 
Guard, with a grand total of 1600 officers and men. 

Not only did his veterans of the Guard follow Napoleon to 
Elba, but his war horses also came to eat their oats in banish- 
ment. There was the little white arab Wagram, who pawed 
his stall and whinnied for sugar whenever the man whom he 
had borne to the conquest of Vienna and the capture of a 
bride came near. There also were bays and chestnuts who, in 
Spain or Russia or Germany, had sped him down the hill from 
the heights of glory. A silvery Persian, although a gift from 
the Czar, had nevertheless returned to Russia as an invading 
foe, and it was on his back that Napoleon viewed Moscow from 
Sparrow Hill. On his back, too, he would yet fight another 
battle — at Waterloo ! 

Nor did the horses lack for exercise. Imperial progresses 
were forever on the schedule. In his gold coach, with all 
brakes set and with the postillions cracking their whips even 
while they leaned back on the reins, His Majesty daily 
coasted down the perpendicular streets of the capital, his 
grand marshal, his military governor and his grooms gallop- 
ing at the wheels. He did not pause until he had visited all 
the little hamlets which, with rustic arches of triumph, with 
children scattering flowers in the imperial pathway, with 
priests chanting Te Deums, bravely tried to outrival one an- 
other in honouring their sovereign. 

The Emperor graciously made due allowance for the awk- 
wardness of his untutored courtiers, whose insular and pastoral 
democracy never before had been called upon to render hom- 
age to a crowned head. When, however, a militia sergeant, 
in an excess of kindness and strength, too vigorously aided 
him to mount his horse, which he ever found a difficult feat, 
by seizing him bodily and pitching him, kicking and protest- 
ing into the saddle, he could not condone such conduct on the 



EMPEROR OF ELBA 405 

part of a common soldier. Instead of punishing the sergeant, 
he adopted a Gilbertian expedient and promoted him to a lieu- 
tenancy, a rank that somewhat excused the liberty he had 
taken with the sacred person of His Majesty ! 

In the very first fortnight of his reign, the forts and the 
mines were inspected, most of the mountains were ascended 
and every mule path in the island was traversed by the Em- 
peror, who left behind him wherever he went his command 
for public improvements. When the wagon roads left off, he 
took to the saddle. When even the paths stopped, he pressed 
on afoot, walking under a broiling sun for ten hours at a 
stretch and "working the flesh off the bones of every one," 
to quote again the chronicler of the Empire. 

When he had completed his exploration of Elba, he sighed 
for more islands and sailed away to the south, where he found 
the midget islet of Pianosa, inhabited only by wild sheep. 
Annexing it on the instant, he fitted out and despatched a 
colony with orders to fortify and cultivate it. In the same 
era of expansion the island of Palmaiola also was annexed and 
fortified. 

Having surveyed and organised his Empire, the Emperor 
next turned to the erection of his imperial palaces. To es- 
cape from the little suite which had been hastily furnished for 
him, up one flight in the city hall, he purchased a windmill, 
at the top of the hill. There he erected from his own plans 
his new Tuileries, but in memory of the demolished mill he 
christened it the Mulini. 

The streets of Portoferrajo consist chiefly of three steep 
stairways up the fort-crowned height, and several shelves across 
the face of the hill. These stairs are named via Napoleone, 
via Victor Hugo and via Garibaldi, their names recalling three 
interesting and diverse characters, who at different times sailed 
into the little Elban world. Garibaldi hid there for awhile in 
the troubled days of '48, and there Hugo passed three or four 
years of his infancy, while his father, an army officer under 
Bonaparte, First Consul of France, was aiding to establish 
French rule in the island. 

At the foot of each of those street-stairways lies the harbour, 



406 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

while Fort Stella, the Mulini palace and Fort Falcone stand 
in a row at the top. The Mulini, which is the property of the 
Italian government now, really is no palace at all, but a 
severely plain, modest dwelling, its plastered walls rising one 
and two stories from a little public square, the Piazzale Na- 
poleone. Some officials are now installed in it, but the green 
shutters are tightly closed on the Emperor's own special apart- 
ments, which are silent and untenanted, save for the spiders 
that spin their webs in the bare rooms where once Napoleon 
himself wove a clever little web. 

At the end of the house, a stone wall shuts in the yard, but 
the custodian swings the gate on its creaking hinges, the 
visitor passes in between two stone posts, on which cannon 
balls are piled, and is in the haunted stillness of the little 
dooryard garden of the imperial exile. It is still fragrant 
with the bloom of flowers, and in a circle of purple lilies stands 
a marble Minerva, the statue and the encircling flowers com- 
bining to suggest the warrior who put on the purple. There 
are also a palm and a pine tree, which seem to symbolise the 
wide rule that he exchanged for his island empire. 

Did he not boast that "I overlook Europe from my win- 
dows?" Well, there are the windows, giving on the garden. 
There across the flower patch is the parapet of the little ter- 
race, hanging high above the blue Tyrrhenian Sea, and there 
is Europe, away off through the cerulean haze, where the 
mountains of Italy break the horizon. 

The St. Cloud, or suburban palace of the Elban Empire 
lies about three miles from Portoferrajo's only gate, which is 
made trebly difficult for assailants and invaders by taking the 
form of a long, dark, twisting tunnel through the broad wall. 
Just outside the gate, the smokestacks of a modern steel mill 
smudge the azure sky. Beyond the mill, the dusty road, the 
only road from the town, stretches about the beautiful little 
bay until the pilgrim to San Martino leaves it for the byway 
that winds up a pretty green hill where Napoleon's simple 
suburban retreat nestles in a sylvan shade. 

Here the banished lord of all Europe settled down to the 
task of tilling a few acres of earth and to establishing a farm 



EMPEROR OF ELBA 407 

that should be a model for his subjects. He planted a grove 
of mulberry trees and he introduced the potato into the is- 
land. But a tablet on a wall in one of the hamlets thus re- 
cords his overthrow as a ploughman: "Napoleon, while pass- 
ing by, took the plough from a peasant, but the oxen rebelled 
against the hands that had guided Europe and broke away 
from the furrow." 

Since the Emperor was resolved to be a farmer, San Mar- 
tino is but a farmhouse of twelve modest sized rooms and 
even less palatial than the Mulini. Its two-story front con- 
tracts into a one-story cottage in the rear, where the rising 
hill cuts off the lower floor, and whither the driveway leads. 

The entrance, therefore, is to the upper floor and into the 
Hall of the Pyramids. A sunken fountain is in the centre 
of this room, the walls of which are covered with imitation 
columns and carvings that some simple artist of the miniature 
empire crudely designed to recall the campaign on the Nile. 
On one of the columns the Emperor caused to be painted this 
inscription, calculated at once to taunt and reassure the mon- 
archs who sent him to Elba : 



Napoleon is Happy Everywhere. 



The room of General Bertrand, the grand marshal, opens 
from one side of the Salle des Pyramides, while on the other 
side is the imperial salon, where two doves flutter in the blue 
sky that overspreads the ceiling, the Emperor having com- 
manded that they ' ' be fastened together by a cord, the knot of 
which tightens the farther they fly apart." It was the exile's 
expression of his hope and longing for Marie Louise. Alas, 
only a ribbon unites the doves, while swords and bayonets cut 
asunder the imperial pair. 

In the next room beyond the salon of the doves, the Em- 
peror slept. Below his chamber, down a steep stair, which 
has only a rope in place of a banister rail, is his bathroom. 



408 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

There above his marble tub the naked figure of Truth painted 
on the wall, continues to peer into a mirror with this moral 
inscribed below: ''He who hates the truth, hates the light." 

The charm of San Martino lies not within its now bare and 
almost humble walls, but out of doors, where Nature was the 
imperial furnisher and decorator. There one may tread Na- 
poleon's path into the depths of a lovely grove over a singing 
brook and to the spring, where he used to fill his leathern cup. 
Or the visitor may step from the imperial suite in the house 
out upon the terrace where, with his spy glass pointed straight 
ahead, the Emperor could examine every sail entering the 
harbour of Portoferrajo, and by turning a little to the left, 
could survey the forts and roofs of his capital. 

Long after the Elban exile was over and even six feet of 
earth sufficed Napoleon, San Martino was purchased by 
Prince Demidoff, the husband of Princess Mathilde, daughter 
of King Jerome Bonaparte. Unfortunately the Prince was 
not so much interested in preserving the simplicity of the 
place as in glorifying his uncle-in-law. In his misdirected 
zeal he set up a high iron fence of gold-tipped spears and 
costly ornate gates with bees and eagles and wreathes wrought 
in them. • 

The capital offence of the nephew by marriage was the erec- 
tion of a big stone temple with high columns and pillars, which 
he planted squarely in front of and against the villa as if to 
hide it from the world. Obtrusive as this structure is when 
viewed from the road, happily it is not seen from the house 
itself, but disappears beneath the terrace. 

The Prince intended to found there a great Napoleonic mu- 
seum. He had no more than gathered together all the relics of 
the Emperor in the island, however, than his feverish interest 
in Elba seems to have subsided and the collection was carried 
off to Florence, whence in time it was dispersed through the 
world. Thus the Elbans have hardly an old shoe or hat to 
show for their vanished Empire. Fortunately they still have 
the walls the Emperor reared, but those of San Martino are 
held in a precarious proprietorship. They passed from the 
Demidoff family into the hands of an islander who had grown 



EMPEROR OF ELBA 409 

rich from the Elban mines. While this new landlord was at- 
tempting to fill the bare cabinets of the museum with a natural 
history collection, he lost his fortune, and some Italian 
creditors took his property, including the historic but deserted 
villa. 

When the heat of the southern summer descended upon San 
Martino, a still simpler abiding place was chosen by the Em- 
peror. This was in the house of a religious hermit, who tended 
an altar of the Madonna high up Monte Giove. On the 2500- 
foot climb along the stony path to this solitary hermitage, 
where the altar candles are still kept burning, the traveller 
leaves the village of Marciana Marina, at the shore, and passes 
through the mountain hamlet of Marciana Alta to the Ma- 
donna's lonely chapel. 

There, in the late summer of his Elban year, Napoleon 
passed a fortnight in the four-room stone hut of the hermit, 
although he really slept in a tent. There, too, is a rocky 
throne — Napoleon's seat, it is called. From it he looked over 
the amethystine sea to the northern slopes of his native 
Corsica, with the town of Bastia shining white against the 
verdant mountain sides. How near together his two islands 
were, and yet how long the path between them! 

The Elbans, only less eagerly than the Emperor, watched 
for the coming of Marie Louise and her child. Napoleon 
himself at first hoped and next begged that those who had 
taken away his empire would restore to him his wife and 
son. His efforts were vain. 

The politicians, so far from permitting the mother and 
child to join him, would not even let them go to their allotted 
duchy, because Parma was too near Elba. They separated 
the Empress and the boy, and moved her about from place to 
place, like a piece on a chessboard. At first she mildly begged 
to be allowed to join her husband in his exile, but soon her 
father brought her back to her girlhood habit of obedience to 
his will. And almost before her summer wanderings in 
Switzerland were over, her pliant affections were quite di- 
verted to Count Neipperg, an ingratiating courtier whom 
Metternich had craftily chosen to attend her. 



410 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The mother of the Emperor, whose prophetic soul had fore- 
told the coming of rainy days and whose maternal thrift had 
made provision for them, came to him as soon as he was fairly 
settled, and she faithfully stayed by his side. Mme. Mere's 
companion was her daughter Pauline. The heedless gaiety 
of this Princess had been Napoleon's torment in prosperity, 
but now she just as gaily shared her brother's fallen fortunes. 

The next of the imperial habitations the Emperor chose 
after he left the Hermitage was hardly less unconventional 
and romantic. This was an old castle at Porto Longone, the 
second port of Elba and on the opposite side of the island 
from Portoferrajo. There a suite of six rooms was fitted up, 
the Emperor choosing for himself a turret looking out upon 
the Italian shore. 

He now had four "palaces," but Elban palaces came cheap. 
A tent sufficed on Monte Giove, and for Porto Longone three 
iron beds, two carpets, a few plain chairs at a cost of $1 each 
and two or three equally simple armchairs and sofas were 
ordered. Indeed the furnishings of the citadel were almost 
as severely simple as they are to-day, when it is the gloomy 
abode of life convicts sent from the mainland. 

The construction or selection of palaces was but a diver- 
sion, an innocent pastime of the island Emperor. His more 
serious care was bestowed upon the welfare of Elba. While 
he housed himself and maintained his table with almost ascetic 
frugality, he shared with the local officials half the expense 
of all public improvements that he ordered. Finding no 
roads, he built them, and wisely planned a complete highway 
system, which still serves the convenience of the people, who 
have yet no railways. It was under his inspiration and direc- 
tion that the husbandmen planted and sowed the waste places, 
and the long-neglected soil was made so productive that it 
supplies now nearly all the needs of a population three or 
four times greater than the number of inhabitants a century 
ago. 

Although it was a tradition among the people that climate 
and earth alike were unfriendly to the olive, the lemon, the 
orange and the mulberry, he introduced them in the island, 



EMPEROR OF ELBA 411 

and they are flourishing there to this day. He developed an 
abundant water supply against seasons of drouth and he im- 
proved the health of the people by draining the swamps and 
by barring the mosquitoes from the springs and wells. He 
also swept the streets and gave the islanders their first lessons 
in cleanliness and sanitation. 

In that attribute which is next to godliness, the Portoferrajo 
of to-day, with its 8000 people, is a shining example and as 
well scrubbed as a village in Holland. The little hotel which 
perpetuates the memory of the imperial symbol in its name, 
"Albergo l'Ape Elbana" — Inn of the Elban Bee — is as clean 
and unpretending as the town. 

The townspeople, the Elbans as a whole, are in keeping with 
their unique, if brief chapter in history. The women are 
pretty, modest and modish, the men kind, honest and self- 
respecting in their welcome of the stranger who comes among 
them seeking the shrines and mementos of the Empire that 
rose and fell in ten months. 

The custodian of the municipio, a veteran of Solferino, 
gently unfurls in the salon of the Emperor the flag of the 
Empire, with its silver bees, and the librarian proudly dis- 
plays the cherished remnants of Napoleon's Elban library. 
The janitor of the theatre, for a church was made over into an 
imperial theatre, seats his callers in the Emperor's box to watch 
him lower the original drop curtain, with its pictorial allegory 
of Apollo fallen from the skies to shepherd a little flock, even 
as Napoleon descended from the throne of Europe to care for 
the Elbans. While one good man is showing some empty wine 
bottles which he treasures because they bear the "N" in the 
laurel wreath, Signorina, his daughter, arrays herself in the 
gown her great-grandmother wore at the imperial court. The 
Elbans even have a young man who sufficiently resembles 
their Emperor to have satisfied the requirements of the oper- 
ators of a moving picture concern, when they came to make 
some films of the exile and the flight, and this "Napoleon of 
the Movies" has become an added exhibit of Portoferrajo. 

The Empire has a day all to itself in the island calendar. 
This day of days is the 5th of May, the anniversary of the 



412 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Emperor's death on another island less fair. Each year, the 
custodian of the municipio gives to the breeze the flag of the 
Empire and solemn services are held in the church of the 
Miserecordia, which is hung in black and gold. From a niche 
in the wall behind doors covered with crowns and eagles, a 
coffin in imitation of the Emperor's at the Invalides in Paris, 
is reverently brought forth and borne to the altar rail, where 
the worshippers passing by may see through a glass, the death 
mask of Napoleon resting on a pillow within the coffin. This 
yearly memorial service was established for all time by a 
provision of Prince Demidoff's will, and the Prince also left 
a legacy for the poor which is distributed on each 5th of 
May. 

Visitors to Elba are few in number and the Elbans have not 
been tempted to commercialise their past and exploit it. 
There are neither guides nor guide books in the little, un- 
sophisticated capital. The sturdy island race is yet un- 
awed by the condescension and uncorrupted by the tips of 
tourists, who pass by with the thought, perhaps, that it must 
be a dreary prison isle, the limbo of the condemned, instead 
of the rare little gem that it really is on the jewelled bosom 
of the tideless sea. 



CHAPTER XLVII 

THE RETURN FROM ELBA 

1815 AGE 45 

NAPOLEON'S return from Elba, in March, 1815, is 
the most adventurous exploit in a life' of adventure. 
Yet those who look upon all human history as the 
prosaic story of one long- struggle for bread and butter have 
some warrant for contending that in escaping from the island, 
in marching on Paris, in reclaiming the crown of France and 
in fighting the Battle of Waterloo, he was not inspired by a 
love of country or glory but impelled by the fear of hunger 
and poverty. In a letter to his government three months be- 
fore the flight, the British commander, Colonel Campbell, 
expressed the opinion that the Emperor would contentedly 
pass the rest of his life in the island if he received his pen- 
sion, but that if he was left without an income he would prob- 
ably take his troops and cross over to the mainland. 

By the Treaty of Fontainebleau at the time of the abdica- 
tion, Austria, Russia and Prussia guaranteed Napoleon the sov- 
ereignty of Elba and a yearly income of $400,000 from the 
French treasury, while his mother and his brothers and sis- 
ters were to receive and divide among themselves $500,000 
a year. The duchies of Parma, Placentia and Guastalla 
were pledged to Marie Louise, and after her, to the King of 
Rome and his descendants, and a suitable provision was to 
be made for Prince Eugene Beauharnais. 

None of those promises was kept. The Allies, who sat 
down in the Congress of Vienna to divide the spoils of their 
victory, gave Eugene nothing, determined that the son of 
Napoleon should not inherit his mother's duchy or be per- 

413 



414 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

mitted even to live with her, and they suffered the Bourbon 
King of France to withhold from the Emperor the annuity 
stipulated in the treaty. 

Although he is supposed to have brought with him from 
France nearly $800,000, Napoleon began to feel the pinch 
acutely as the months went by. He pressed the people for 
their taxes until they riotously rebelled and he raked together 
all the useless old guns, and shipped them to Italy, where he 
sold them for junk and where he also found a market for 
some mouldy flour which he discovered in the commissariat. 

When he adopted the expedient of paying off with due 
bills on the French treasury, a feeling of homesickness spread 
among his troops and retainers until it threatened to become 
epidemic, and the army dwindled away from resignations and 
desertions. And the soldiers were no mere ornaments of 
the Empire. The Emperor had organised the little army to 
defend his island against the ever-present peril of the Bar- 
bary corsairs, but as time wore on, he came to regard it as 
his only protection from assassination or deportation at the 
instance of the allied nations themselves. 

Talleyrand and Louis XVIII were agreed that he should 
be sent farther away, to the Azores, perhaps, which were 
some 800 miles out in the Atlantic, or to St. Lucia in the 
West Indies. His Corsican enemy, Pozzo di Borgo, re- 
ported a unanimous sentiment among the statesmen gathered 
in Vienna, for his removal "from the eyes of Europe" and 
"as far as possible." Pozzo himself thought St. Helena would 
be an excellent choice. 

When Talleyrand declared "we must hasten to get rid of 
the man from Elba," Napoleon was left in doubt whether 
he would be called upon to defend himself from kidnapers 
or assassins. The choice really had narrowed down to abduc- 
tion or assassination, bankruptcy or flight when he chose the 
latter. He knew that France was growing restive under the 
reactionary policy of the Bourbon rule which foreign armies 
had imposed on the country, and that the French army was 
filled with the spirit of revolt. 

As he wrestled with his problem in secret, he retired more 



THE EETURN FROM ELBA 415 

and more within himself. Colonel Campbell, the British com- 
missioner, was impressed with "something wild in his air." 
When, however, the colonel, in the middle of February, made 
a parting call before leaving for a brief absence in Italy, he 
found the Emperor "unusually dull and reserved," appar- 
ently interested in nothing but the affairs of his little Em- 
pire, its roads and bridges, and in his farms and gardens, 
with their cabbages and onions and flower beds. Neverthe- 
less, Campbell had his misgivings, but his suspicions were 
laughed away in Florence. "When you return to Elba," an 
inspired British under secretary of state for foreign affairs 
said to the commissioner, "you may tell Bonaparte that he 
is quite forgotten in Europe. Nobody thinks of him at all. 
He is quite forgotten — as much as if he had never existed." 

Meanwhile the Great Forgotten was dividing his attentions 
between the flower beds at the Mulini and at Fort Stella, 
which his soldiers were laboriously preparing, and the equip- 
ment of his leaky little navy for a mysterious cruise. Abso- 
lutely no one else knew when or whither the vessels would 
sail, until he let Mme. Mere into the secret the day before the 
departure and received the blessing of that spartan mother. 

The next day was Sunday, and there was a levee at the 
Mulini, when the Emperor astounded the company by frankly 
announcing that he should quit Elba that night. The island 
was already shut in, no boat having been permitted to leave or 
enter any of the ports for two days. All the while the grena- 
diers continued to pat down the loam in the garden. 

It was not until five in the afternoon that the drums beat 
to arms, and an army of 1100 men embarked for the con- 
quest of France, on a flotilla comprising the brig Inconstant, 
of 300 tons and eighteen guns; the bombard VEtoile, of 
eighty tons, and five feluccas of from twenty-five to fifty tons 
each. It was an enchanting evening, in one of the most 
beautiful harbours of all the Mediterranean. The Emperor 
stood on the quarterdeck. The town band played the "Mar- 
seillaise." The townspeople cheered and the mayor's tears 
fell upon the dock. 

How many times had wind and wave befriended the 



416 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

islander on this, his native sea ! They had borne him a fugi- 
tive from Corsica to Toulon and to his first victory. They 
had parted a lane for him through Nelson's fleet as he went 
to find an empire in the east and as he returned to find it in 
the west. The very south wind which now sped him back 
to his throne, left Campbell sitting helplessly under the lazily 
flapping sails of the British warship Partridge, becalmed in 
the harbour of Leghorn. 

On the fourth day of the voyage while the early afternoon 
sun was glowing on the terraced gardens of the French shore 
and glistening on the still snowy peaks of the Maritime Alps, 
Napoleon sailed into the wide Gulf Juan. On one side of 
the bay he saw the island of Marguerite. As he glanced at 
its castle walls in their melancholy beauty rising from the 
waters he must have thought — as who does not ? — of the Pris- 
oner in the Iron Mask, who has left his mystery clinging to 
them forever. Across the bay on the other side, the roofs of 
Antibes must have called to his recollection another prisoner 
— himself, for there in the old grey fort he had sat in the 
shadow of the guillotine after the fall of Robespierre. 

How often the voyage of his life had brought him to that 
beautiful Riviera ; how often the tide in his affairs had borne 
him in and out of its lovely harbours! In the west, was 
Toulon, whither he had come an exile from Corsica only two 
and twenty years before, where he fought his first battle and 
whence he embarked for Egypt. Only around the mountain- 
ous headland to his left was the port of Frejus, where he had 
been welcomed home from the Orient and whence he had en- 
tered upon his Elban banishment. 'Beyond the Antibean 
Cape on his right, lay Nice, where he had taken command of 
the Army of Italy, and farther along was Savona, out of 
which the Little Corporal sped in the night to burst into fame 
on the heights of Montenotte. On no other stage had he so 
often astonished the world. Now he was about to eclipse all 
the surprises that had gone before. 

The passerby along the villa-lined avenue from Cannes to 
Nice sees in the shade of a tree by the roadside, a simple shaft 
of stone rising to tell no other story than this: 



THE RETURN FROM ELBA 417 



Souvenir of 
March 1, 1815 



Not another word is carved upon the monument. It is 
simply a place mark at the opening page of an extraordinary 
chapter in history. Trolley cars and a procession of auto- 
mobiles now race by the stone, where a century ago a quiet 
country lane took its leisurely course, while winter hotels 
and their clutter of shops look upon the once lonely beach, 
where, with indifferent curiosity, a few charcoal burners and 
a few fishermen mending their nets saw Napoleon step 
ashore. 

''Now," he chuckled, "I am about to enact a great nov- 
elty." He very well knew that if France were to be con- 
quered it was not to be done by 1100 followers, but by him- 
self alone. His orders to Cambronne were: "Do not fire a 
single shot. Remember, I wish to recapture my crown with- 
out shedding a drop of blood." Paper bullets were to be his 
only ammunition. 

"Frenchmen," he proclaimed in a shower of leaflets that 
fell before him as he advanced, "in my exile I heard your 
plaints and prayers. ... I have crossed the sea amid perils 
of every kind, and I am come to assert my rights which also 
are yours. . . . Soldiers, ' ' he said, turning to the one element 
that really felt a lively longing for him, "your general . . . 
who was raised upon your bucklers is restored to you. Come 
and join him ! Tear down those colours . . . which for 
twenty-five years have served to mark the rallying point of 
France's enemies." 

As the evening came he rose from the maps he had spread 
on the ground where the memorial stone stands and entered 
the village of Cannes, three miles away. It was not yet the 
brilliant and populous city of big winter hotels and splendid 
winter villas, which English sojourners have annexed to Eng- 
land and where in token of their conquest they have set up 



418 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

statues of Lord Brougham, King Edward, and the Duke 
of Albany and laid out their tennis courts and golf 
links. 

The Cannes that received Napoleon in silence is still there, 
however, its narrow, dusky streets bending about the foot of 
Mt. Chevalier. Just where the modern city joins the old 
town, the postoffice now rises in what was an orchard that 
March evening when a cold night wind blowing through the 
olive trees chilled the marrow and the humour of the Emperor 
as he shivered by his bivouac fire. And the lamp posts of 
the Rue Bivouac sufficiently commemorate that second halt- 
ing place of the eagle in his flight "from steeple to steeple 
even to the towers of Notre Dame," as one of the proclama- 
tions announced. 

Camp was broken at midnight. Some time afterward the 
Emperor mounted his horse and, leaving the little village 
sleeping in the dark shadow of Mont Chevalier, he rode on 
in the night up the 1000-foot slope to Grasse, that butterfly 
town which draws its sustenance from the perfume flowers 
that cover its hillsides. Day was peeping over the Alpine 
heights when the imperial wayfarer came to Grasse. He 
chose not to halt in the town and passed by to eat his break- 
fast in a field above, where, enthroned on a pile of knap- 
sacks, he drank his coffee and munched his bread. 

Three cypresses mark the scene of that imperial dejeuner, 
the scene of that dawning of the Hundred Days. Nature 
could hardly set a prettier table than in that grassy meadow 
by the three slender, graceful trees. A beautiful cascade 
purls its headlong way over the brow of a sheer cliff. Far 
below, the old cathedral of Grasse lifts its grizzled tower 
while a lovely blooming vale opens a vista clear to the Gulf 
Juan. 

The reception of the returned monarch thus far had been 
only coldly civil. The people living on and near the coast 
had viewed afar the glory of his military campaigns, but 
they had not been witnesses to any of his victories. On the 
contrary, they remembered his reign chiefly as an era when 
their harbours were sealed, and when they could not look 



THE RETURN FROM ELBA 419 

across their watery frontier without beholding a British sea 
wolf prowling along the horizon. 

Napoleon did not deceive himself. He knew that the peo- 
ple as a whole did not want him back any more than they 
wished him to stay when they hooted him out of Provence, 
less than a year before. It was in his distrust of the popular 
temper that he had chosen to begin his march on Paris by a 
narrow path through the wild and sparsely populated moun- 
tains rather than by the broad highway up the populous val- 
ley of the Rhone. He chose the hazards offered by nature 
rather than to contend with human obstacles. 

As the Emperor looked up at the Basses Alpes, which rose 
before him in his chosen pathway to the throne, he foresaw 
the difficulty of dragging his artillery over those heights and 
he ordered that it be abandoned. There were only four can- 
non all told and he knew that their little whiff of grapeshot 
would not conquer Paris for him this time. Not those four 
cannon, but the three-cornered hat and the old grey coat must 
be relied on to break the ranks and silence the battery of the 
army of 180,000 men, sworn to defend Louis XVIII on the 
throne of his fathers. 

When he left Grasse, therefore, it was to enter upon 
hardly more than a goat path, along which he hastened his 
little band in single file through snow and ice and in peril 
of frightful abysses. 

That night the imperial bed was only a bundle of straw 
in a wretched, solitary cottage near the village of Seranon. 
The next day the march was by the chateau of Castellane to 
Bareme, which was reached in a heavy snowstorm. All that 
had been saved from the money taken to Elba amounted to 
$350,000, and it was carried on the backs of mules. One of 
the animals falling had scattered over the snow $60,000 in 
gold, a third of which was lost beyond recovery. 

After a night at Bareme, the Emperor descended to the 
valley of the Bleone, where it grudgingly widens barely 
enough to accommodate the picturesque old provincial capi- 
tal of the department of the Basses Alpes. There, at Digne, 
he found a welcoming friend in the bishop, who was a 



420 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

brother of General Miollis and who was only a poor cure 
when, at the General's request, Napoleon had elevated him 
to the bishopric. 

The bishop sleeps now behind the high altar of his cathe- 
dral at Digne; but he lives in the saintly character of Mon- 
signeur Bienvenu in "Les Miserables. " For it was upon a 
kindness of the bishop of Digne toward a man who had tried 
to rob him that Victor Hugo built the character of Jean 
Valjean. 

After rescuing the thief from crime, the cure sent him to 
serve in Egypt under his brother, General Miollis. According 
to the local legend, the veteran was in Digne again when Na- 
poleon came along on his march from exile and he followed 
the Emperor to Paris and to Waterloo, where he perished on 
the field. "Jean Valjean" therefore will have to be enrolled 
as one of the four recruits whom history records as having 
rallied to the imperial eagles in the course of the first five 
days of the march. 

From Digne, Napoleon marched to Sisteron, whose fortress 
is perched upon a rock at the head of the Valley of the Dur- 
ance. Nature made it so difficult to get around this citadel 
that modern engineers gave up the problem and the railroad 
to-day dodges under the fort. From its loopholes a few guns 
could have turned back the advancing Kmperor, but the Bour- 
bon army officers were watching for him over in the valley 
of the Rhone. There was not a musket to challenge him at 
Sisteron, whence he rode away on a wave of cheers and with 
many gifts of horses, wagons and provisions. There, at the 
threshold of Dauphiny, he was leaving behind him the un- 
sympathetic people of the seacoast and entering among the 
adventurous mountaineers who loved the glory of arms and 
who, in the safety of their fastnesses, hated the foreigners 
that had overrun the plains and seated their Bourbon pup- 
pet on the throne of France. 

It was on that 5th of March that the news of the escape 
from Elba reached the congress of sovereigns and diplomats 
in the midst of their jealous map making at Vienna, and that 
the news of the landing at Gulf Juan reached Paris. While 



THE RETURN FROM ELBA 421 

the Austrian capital was trying to guess whither the eagle 
had flown, the officials at the French capital engaged in plans 
for his capture. The Comte d'Artois, brother of Louis 
XVIII, and afterward King Charles X, started at once for 
Lyons to stop his march on Paris, and a proclamation was 
issued, authorising any one to take him dead or alive. 

In the heart of Dauphiny, the imposing little city of 
Grenoble, which gloves the hands of France and millions of 
other hands besides, sits by the bending River Isere, gazing 
up at the Alps, whose snowy spurs seem to rise at the end 
of every street. This was the first place of any size or im- 
portance on the line of march and Napoleon could not have 
but wondered how fortune would greet him at the gate of 
Grenoble. That prankish goddess did not wait for him at 
the gate. In her eagerness to play one of her most extraordi- 
nary pranks she went forth to greet him when he was yet 
fifteen miles away, near the village of Laffrey. 

Laffrey itself is a mere cluster of little stone cottages that 
seem to have rolled like boulders from the flowered hillsides 
down into the narrow ravine through which the high road 
makes its way. On the churchyard wall a tablet records the 
words with which in a breath Napoleon overturned the 
Bourbon throne. 

While he was yet a mile away from the village and was 
riding along the ravine road, with the white mantle of the 
Grande Chartreuse looming before him, he saw a battalion 
of infantry from Grenoble blocking his way. There at last 
the lilies confronted the bees. The Emperor saw that the 
hour had struck for him to put his fate to the touch to gain 
or lose it all. And he sent one of his aides galloping ahead 
to cry out that the Emperor was approaching. 

As a Bourbon officer saw a little man in a grey coat and 
three-cornered hat, advancing afoot and alone along the 
road, he shouted to the soldiers, ''There he is! Fire!" 
But the soldiers, with bayonets drawn, stood motionless as 
in a tableau while Napoleon boldly walked up to them. 
"When he was but a few paces away, the familiar tones of his 
voice rang out upon the tense silence, as he cried : 



422 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

"Soldiers! I am your Emperor! Do you not recognise 
me?" 

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" hundreds of voices responded with a 
fervent shout. 

Now unbuttoning his grey coat, he offered his breast to 
their muskets as he challenged them: "If there is one 
among you who would shoot his general, here I am!" 

"Vive l'Empereur!" rose in a shriek from the ranks. 
The soldiers lifted their bayonets only to place their shakos 
on them and wave them in the air. Rushing upon the Em- 
peror, they covered his hands with kisses and filled his ears 
with endearing names. 

"It is all settled!" Napoleon smiled to his staff out of the 
midst of the soldiers. "In ten days we shall be in the 
Tuileries." 

With the cheering battalion leading the march, the Em- 
peror entered Laffrey village, where he received another re- 
cruit. This was a rich glove manufacturer of Grenoble, Jean 
Demoulin, who brought in his arms a gift of $20,000 in gold. 

The snowball was now growing very fast. At the next 
village a Bourbon regiment, which was marching out from 
Grenoble under Colonel Labedoyere, came only to fall in with 
the battalion behind the Emperor. 

Thenceforth the perplexing question before the Bourbons 
was whether it were better to hurry the soldiers away from 
his magic and abandon the road to him or risk the loss of both 
the army and the country. 

The people of Grenoble were watching for the Emperor 
from their walls when he appeared before that city, and they 
welcomed him with ringing cheers. The Bourbon officials 
before taking flight had locked the gate, which the citizens 
within and the soldiers without quickly battered down. The 
Emperor rode in over the debris and went to the Inn of the 
Three Dauphins, where he settled himself in a room which is 
preserved in the present Hotel Moderne et des Trois Dau- 
phins. There the people soon came and called him out upon 
the balcony, when their spokesman explained that since they 



THE RETURN FROM ELBA 423 

were unable to present to him the keys of his good city of 
Grenoble, they had brought him the gate itself! 

The campaign was already won. "Until Grenoble I was 
an adventurer," Napoleon said. "But after Grenoble I was 
a prince!" 

As he moved upon Lyons, the Comte d'Artois made ready 
to resist his progress. When, however, the Count found that 
the soldiers refused to cry "Vive le Roi, " he prudently left 
the command to Marshal Macdonald, who strove loyally to 
erect batteries for the defence of the city. When at a shout 
of "Vive l'Empereur" the soldiers began pulling down the 
works they had only just raised, the marshal put spurs to his 
horse and raced away as if fearing to catch the infection. 

Napoleon entered Lyons and sat down there to issue his 
imperial decrees and recast the government of France. On 
the same day, the Allies in the Vienna Congress were denounc- 
ing him as outside the pale of civilisation and delivering him 
up "to public vengeance as the enemy and disturber of the 
world's repose." 

Only one more barrier now lay between the Emperor and 
his throne. Marshal Ney had been despatched by the Bour- 
bon government to assemble its scattered army and capture 
the invader of the realm. The marshal not only promised 
to take him, but to bring him back in an iron cage. When 
some one suggested it would be safer to kill him outright, 
Ney insisted that it would be more exemplary to exhibit him 
to the people of Paris. 

Once among his soldiers, however, the marshal heard again 
the old cheer for the Emperor. Soon he received the Emper- 
or's command to join him, with the promise that he would 
greet him "as on the morn of the battle of the Moskva" — 
where he had invested him with his princely title. After a 
painful and tumultuous conflict in his bosom, the simple sol- 
dier plunged into the tide and announced to his army : "I am 
now about to take you to the immortal phalanx which the 
Emperor is leading to Paris." 

After that it was idle for the Bourbons to attempt any 



424 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

further resistance. The truth of the situation was expressed 
in a jesting placard fastened to the Vendome column: "Na- 
poleon to Louis XVIII: My good brother, it is useless to 
send me more troops; I already have enough!" 

The King saw his throne for which he had waited in exile 
twenty years, sinking beneath him as if in a quicksand. 
The Emperor was near Fontainebleau, when a torchbearer 
lighted Louis out of the Tuileries at midnight of Palm Sun- 
day. For hours afterward, the great palace remained de- 
serted while Paris, unmoved, silently looked on at the sud- 
denly shifting scene. 

Again Napoleon drove into Cour de France, but this time 
to review a triumphant army where only a few months be- 
fore he had sat amid the wreckage of his Empire. At nine 
o'clock that evening a carriage, with a regiment of cavalry as 
its escort, dashed through the rain and fog into the court- 
yard of the Tuileries. The coach door was pulled open, the 
Emperor was snatched from his seat and, with a smile on his 
lips and with tears on his cheeks, was carried up the grand 
stairway of the palace. 



CHAPTER XLVIII 
THE HUNDRED DAYS 

1815 AGE 45 

THE Hundred Days stand alone in history. Historians 
hardly know whether to dignify that brief, but ex- 
traordinary, period as an epoch or dismiss it as an 
episode. Surely no other fifteen weeks in the chronology of 
the world can equal in dramatic interest those which began 
with the return from Elba in March, 1815, and ended with 
the battle of Waterloo in June. 

As the King ran out one door of the Tuileries and the 
Emperor ran in the other, it was a simple matter to tear 
away the lilies that had been stitched over the bees on the 
palace tapestries. The violet also had become a symbol of 
allegiance to the Emperor. It was in bloom when he left for 
Elba, and the legend grew that he had promised to return 
when the violets bloomed again. The faithful, who in secret 
waited and longed for the restoration of the Empire, fondly 
toasted the exiled monarch as "Father Violet," or "Cor- 
poral Violet;" songs were sung to "le Pere de la Violette," 
and the flower was worn when it would have been treason to 
wear a red, white and blue ribbon. 

With the return from Elba and the fulfilment of the 
prophecy in the legend, the women of Paris wore huge 
bunches of violets and trimmed their morning caps with 
them, while the jewellers hastened to manufacture violet pins 
and brooches. On the other hand, women who were un- 
swerving royalists dared not open a floral war and pit the 
lily against the violet; but they wore with impunity eighteen 
tucks in their skirts as a sign of their loyalty to the fugitive 
Louis XVIII. 

425 



426 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The people who loafed about the throne recanted their 
solemn oaths of allegiance and their political principles as 
swiftly as they changed their ribbons and their boutonnieres. 
The Emperor himself exclaimed, as he saw the politicians and 
generals who less than a year before had hastened to desert 
his fallen fortunes equally quick now to forsake the fleeing 
King, "Just like mankind! One must laugh at them to keep 
from crying ! ' ' 

He knew that he had been placed on the throne again by 
a mere military revolution, and that only a few thousand 
men, all told, had taken part in the movement. The nation 
had been only a looker-on. "The people have let me come," 
he frankly admitted, "just as they let the others go." 

The French were no longer Bourbon or Bonapartist, and 
the heart of the rended nation wished a plague on both 
their houses. The people were sick of glory purchased with 
blood and longed only for liberty and peace. 

Amid all the rapid changes which the men who flocked 
about him were undergoing, the Emperor announced that 
he, too, had changed. He renounced his dream of conquest, 
and declared to the allied nations who had denounced him as 
an outlaw that he accepted finally and forever the narrow 
frontiers within which they had shut France. At the same 
time, he ordered that a free constitution be drawn up. 

The efforts of the Emperor, however, to establish relations 
with the nations of Europe were met on every hand with 
scornful rebuffs. The Congress of Vienna had only just fin- 
ished recasting the map of Europe when he returned to the 
continent, The consternation caused by his apparition was 
succeeded by a united determination to beat him down. The 
armed coalition of 1813-14 was renewed and plans adopted 
for reopening the campaign with 800,000 troops. France was 
cut off from the world, her ships being seized the moment 
they ventured out of port, and her trade and her mails were 
blockaded on every road that crossed the frontier. 

Not only was Europe united against Napoleon as never be- 
fore, but France for the first time was divided in her sup- 
port of him. Although it was he who had sent up the na- 



THE HUNDRED DAYS 427 

tional securities from twelve francs to ninety-three, his re- 
turn to power now caused a panic in the stock market. 
When the corps legislatif was elected after his return, five- 
sixths of its members were unsympathetic and that body made 
haste to declare its independence of the Emperor. The coun- 
try responded as indifferently to his military as to his political 
measures. With all the efforts he put forth to raise up an 
army of national defence, it is doubtful if he obtained more 
than 50,000 effective recruits in the course of the Hundred 
Days. 

With these and the troops he inherited from Louis XVIII, 
he had not quite 200,000 soldiers available for service early 
in June. Already there were more than 200,000 of the Allies 
in Belgium, 150,000 Russians and 210,000 Austrians on the 
march across Germany, and 80,000 Austrians and Italians 
threatening an invasion by the Mediterranean coast. With 
the Russian contingent, far more than half a million men 
were in the field against him and his 200,000. 

He debated for a time whether to make an offensive or de- 
fensive campaign, whether to attempt a Napoleonic surprise 
and fall upon an unprepared and divided enemy or to take 
his stand at the gates of Paris and there await the invading 
forces. 

Finally the more aggressive and more characteristic policy 
was adopted. Probably the truth is, Napoleon dared not 
trust the loyalty of France in a war on her own soil, and that 
when he went forth to meet the Allies beyond the frontier, he 
sought a quick victory as much for its effect on the French 
people as upon the enemy. 

Even as he was going to the front, he was made to feel how 
perilous was his position at home. The English having 
landed some muskets and ammunition on the coast of Brit- 
tany, the tocsin of civil war was rung again in Bourbon 
Vendee. To stamp out that insurrection behind him, the 
Emperor had to detach some 20,000 soldiers — 20,000 men who 
otherwise might have been at Waterloo ! 

The Allies were fooled by the same old trick that Napo- 
leon had successfully played at the opening of nearly all his 



428 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

wars. The Duke of "Wellington and Marshal Bliicher, com- 
manding the allied forces in Belgium, contented themselves 
with watching him in Paris and did not take the trouble to 
watch his army. As they saw him holding reviews of raw, 
unarmed militia in the courtyard of the Tuileries, or deliv- 
ering orations to the corps legislatif, they left their armies 
carelessly dispersed all over the Belgian country, while they 
waited to open a great campaign against Paris when the Aus- 
trians and Russians should have crossed the Rhine. 

"Bonaparte will not attack us," Bliicher wrote his wife 
early in June. Even when the French army stood at the 
frontier, poised for a spring upon the scattered British, 
Dutch and Germans, and the Emperor was fairly flying to 
the front, Wellington wrote, "I judge from his speech to the 
corps legislatif that his departure is not likely to be imme- 
diate." That letter was penned just five days before the 
Battle of Waterloo! 

Napoleon had already stolen out of Paris at dawn of June 
12 and he was at Laon in less than twelve hours. On the 
14th, he joined his army at Beaumont, the last French town 
on the road to Charleroi, Waterloo, and Brussels. The 
Belgian frontier was passed before sunrise on the 15th and 
the crossing of the River Sambre began at noon. Riding 
into Charleroi, the Emperor sat down in a chair at the fork 
of the Brussels and Ligny roads and fell into a sound sleep. 
He had been travelling from Paris night and day, and had 
been in the saddle seven hours that morning. Even the 
cheers of the passing battalions, the blaring of trumpeters 
and the beating of drums did not awaken him as his army 
marched by. 

While he sat there, Ney came up and presented himself 
for service. The Emperor had so reluctantly and tardily 
summoned him that the marshal could not join the army 
earlier. Even now he received a cool welcome, and was dis- 
missed with the command, "Go drive the enemy along the 
Brussels road and take up your position at Quatre Bras." 

The problem of the campaign on both sides was brutally 
simple. Wellington, still at Brussels, was in command of 



THE HUNDRED DAYS 429 

35,000 British, 45,000 Germans and 25,000 Dutch and Bel- 
gians — an army of about 105,000 men. Blucher, now march- 
ing from Namur, had an army of about 117,000 Prussians. 
If the two armies should unite, they would have a total of 
222,000 men, including 175,000 infantry and 25,000 cavalry, 
supported by more than 500 guns. 

Napoleon, on the other hand, had been able to bring up 
only 125,000 men, including 90,000 infantry, 22,000 cavalry 
and 10,000 artillery, with less than 350 guns. Plainly, Well- 
ington and Blucher must be kept apart if the 125,000 French 
were to have any chance to win. 

That night of the 15th while Ney, in front of Quatre Bras, 
was held in check only by some Dutch battalions, Welling- 
ton and his officers were at the Duchess of Richmond's ball, 
whose sound of revelry in Belgium's capital, Byron has sent 
echoing down the corridor of time. There in the midst of 
fair women and brave men, dance orders contended with 
battle orders until three o'clock in the morning of the 16th, 
when the British commander, becoming once more the Iron 
Duke, started for the front after gentle fingers had buckled 
on his sword. 

The first necessity of the Allies was to unite their forces. 
The Prussians already were hurrying along the road from 
Namur, when Wellington hastily proceeded to concentrate 
his contingent at Quatre Bras on the Charleroi-Brussels 
highway. 

For the purpose of concerting measures, the Duke and 
Blucher met late in that forenoon of the 16th at a windmill 
near Ligny. As the two allied commanders sat there on that 
eminence, Napoleon in the midst of his staff sat beside an- 
other mill on another hill only a little way across the wheat 
fields. Between the two mills flows a little brook, the Ligne, 
and on its banks was a little cluster of houses, the hamlet of 
Ligny. 

Even as Wellington galloped away toward Quatre Bras, he 
could see the French moving down upon Ligny for the pur- 
pose of stopping the Prussian advance westward. Unlike 
the thunderbolt he was in other and earlier days, however, 



430 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Napoleon had hesitated and withheld the blow until Bliicher 
was enabled to assemble nearly 90,000 men against the 70,000 
he himself could put in the battle. 

All afternoon the French artillery poured its deadly hail 
upon the Prussian masses that held the slope beyond the vil- 
lage, while the infantry of the two armies trampled the grain 
fields and wrestled at bayonet length in the narrow, winding 
lanes, in the churchyard, in the barnyards and within the 
very cottage walls of Ligny. Then in the waning of a day 
of sulphurous heat, the warring forces of the air burst into 
battle. Lightning flashes shot across the dark heavens; 
salvos of thunder shook the heavy atmosphere; the leaden 
skies opened and the floods descended upon the embattled 
armies. 

Under cover of those bewildering flashes and crashes of 
Jove's artillery, the Emperor led forth the Old Guard and 
they leaped the brook and snatched the village. Bliicher 's 
horse was shot from under him, and he was only saved from 
capture by the timely appearance of a squadron of' Uhlans. 
The Old Guard swept on irresistibly over Ligny and up the 
slope to the windmill, leaving a path through the Prussian 
centre and the enemy's army broken in pieces. 

Perhaps 15,000 Prussians and 11,000 French lay dead or 
wounded on that field of Napoleon's last victory in battle. 
For as Toulon was written at the top of the red roll of his 
victories, so Ligny is inscribed at the bottom. 

The Emperor went to sleep that night in the chateau of 
Fleuris, congratulating himself that he had opened his cam- 
paign with a blow as crushing as that of Jena. But there 
was a fatal difference. While he was winning the Battle of 
Jena, Davout was winning the Battle of Auerstadt, twelve 
miles away. Now, while he had been winning the Battle of 
Ligny, Ney had lost the battle of Quatre Bras, seven miles 
away. 

There, with an irresolution foreign to his impetuous temper 
in his prime, the marshal had dallied with the hours until 
he was heavily outnumbered. He was seized with the frenzy 
of desperation when he saw the day slipping away from him 



THE HUNDRED DAYS 431 

and recollected the Emperor's message to him in the morn- 
ing, "The fate of France is in your hands." He well knew 
that his own fate also was at stake. Having first deserted 
Napoleon in 1814, and now the Bourbons in 1815, the hap- 
less marshal fought "with a halter round his neck," and, 
waving his sword like a madman, he cried out for the Eng- 
lish bullets to deliver him from his despair. When night 
fell, Wellington still held the road to Brussels — and Waterloo ! 

Napoleon, however, confident that he had put the Prussians 
out of action and could dispose of Wellington singly and at 
his leisure, took his ease the next day, the 17th — the day be- 
fore Waterloo ! He felt sure that the Allies were hopelessly 
separated, and that the rended Prussian army was in a re- 
treat on its bases of supply at Liege and Namur. 

He breakfasted unusually late, and it was not until eleven 
o'clock that he ordered Marshal Grouchy to take 33,000 men 
and 115 guns and pursue Bliicher. "While I march against 
the English," he said, "you will pursue the Prussians." 

Grouchy objected that it was too late for him to take up 
the pursuit of an army that had started more than twelve 
hours ahead of him. The Emperor, however, cut him short, 
and sent the marshal and his 33,000 men away, never to see 
them again. 

Meanwhile Wellington at Quatre Bras was receiving word 
that the Prussians were by no means retiring from the cam- 
paign, but were moving northward by the nearest available 
road to Brussels. The Duke, therefore, ordered his own 
force to fall back in the hope of uniting with the Prussians 
farther north. Thus in the afternoon of the 17th, the Allies 
were marching by parallel roads only eight and ten miles 
apart. 

When Napoleon came in sight of Quatre Bras, Wellington 
was gone, and only a rear guard remained. Lord Uxbridge, 
the commander of the rear guard, saw him appear on the 
crest of a ridge, a perfect silhouette against the sky, and 
cried to his gunners: "Fire, and aim well." But they 
missed the mark. 

With Napoleon and his Guard at the heels of Uxbridge 's 



432 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

rear guard, there began a wild chase along the Brussels road. 
Another afternoon storm beat down upon them as pursued 
and pursuers, dripping wet, raced from hamlet to hamlet. 
The Emperor, in a fury of impatience, shouted: "Fire! 
Fire ! Fire ! They are English ! ' ' For it was the first time 
since Toulon, twenty-one years before, that he had come in 
sight of a red coat. 

At half-past six of a cloudy, foggy evening, the Emperor, 
with the rain streaming down him, came to a rude, one-story 
roadside cottage, whose proud owner had celebrated his 
matrimonial alliance with the belle of the countryside by 
naming it "La Belle Alliance." Out of the darkness in 
trout of him he heard the cannon of the enemy. Was it only 
Uxbridge who was firing? Or were Wellington and his 
army out there in the night, preparing to stand for battle on 
the morrow? 

To solve the doubt he ordered several of his field batteries 
to open fire. And Wellington answered with a roaring 
cannonade. 

The doubt was resolved. Napoleon had arrived at the 
trysting place of fate, and soon he saw the camp fires of the 
British army flaring in the blackness of the stormy, cheerless 
n ig lit that covered with its pall the field of Waterloo. 



CHAPTER XLIX 

WATERLOO 

JUNE 15, 1815 AGE 45 

NATUEE played a dreary and fitting overture the night 
before the battle of Waterloo. The skies opened wide, 
and the 140,000 soldiers of Napoleon and Wellington, 
without a tent to shelter them from the almost incessant 
downpour, slept on the sodden earth or stood in groups and 
drowsed on one another's shoulders. 

The Duke of Wellington made his headquarters in a house 
still seen and a room still shown opposite the church in the 
village of Waterloo, while his adversary stayed in a large 
farmhouse, Le Caillou, which continues to present its stone 
gables to the Charleroi-Brussels road. There, lying on his 
iron camp bed, beneath a gold fringed, silk counterpane and 
a canopy with green satin curtains, Napoleon dreamed his 
last dream of victory. 

At midnight, a courier from Marshal Grouchy came drip- 
ping into Le Caillou with a. despatch reporting that Bliicher, 
instead of retiring from the campaign, seemed to be march- 
ing toward Wavre, and that if this should prove to be the 
case, he, too, would march to Wavre in order to keep the Prus- 
sians from joining the British. Although the courier said 
that an answer was expected, he was sent away without any. 
Yet one inspiring suggestion then to the uninspired marshal 
might have made Waterloo spell success. 

At that same midnight hour, the Prussians, who had al- 
ready arrived at Wavre, were deciding in a council of war 
to join the British at once. In two hours more, Wellington 
received from Bliicher the cheering promise of help and he 
finally determined to make a stand at Waterloo. 

While the Duke was reading that welcome despatch at two 

433 



434 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

o'clock, Napoleon was up and visiting the camp of his rain- 
drenched army. Peering through the shadows of the star- 
less night, he traced the flaming lines of the enemy and the 
black outline of the Forest of Soignes beyond. 

The Emperor never ceased to express his amazement that 
Wellington should have risked a battle with his back to that 
forest. The Duke, on the other hand, always insisted that its 
tall and well separated trees, its lack of underbrush and its 
many woods roads offered sufficient facilities for the retreat 
of a beaten army. 

The sun of Waterloo rose at twelve minutes of four on a 
Sunday morning in June. But it hid its face behind the 
weeping clouds. The rain soon stopped, however, and "at 
five o'clock," so he dictated at St. Helena, "the Emperor 
perceived a few feeble rays of that sun which should before 
setting light up the destruction of the British army." 

It was Napoleon's habit to strike early. At Montenotte, 
Austerlitz, Jena and Wagram, he began at sunrise. At 
Waterloo, he made a fatal delay on the advice of General 
Drouot, who asked him to wait for the ground to dry so that 
the gun carriages could be more readily moved. Ever after, 
Drouot lamented that but for him the Emperor might have 
attacked Wellington at seven, won at ten, and been ready for 
Bllicher in the afternoon. 

The British were promptly in line. While they were 
forming in battle array, with trumpets blaring, drums beat- 
ing, and bagpipes wailing, a spirited cavalcade dashed upon 
the scene from the direction of Waterloo village. It was 
the Duke of Wellington seated on his war horse "Copen- 
hagen," and attended by his staff, including the Prince of 
Orange, the Duke of Richmond and several of the great 
nobles of Britain. They came upon the battlefield as gaily 
as they would ride to meet the hounds in a quiet English 
county. Among them was that unfailing Corsican huntsman, 
Pozzo di Borgo, who had chased the quarry for twenty years 
and all over the fields of Europe. 

There were yet no heroes in khaki, and as he rode his lines, 
the noble Duke was apparelled like a bridegroom. His cocked 



WATERLOO 435 

hat sported four cockades in the colours of England, Spain, 
Portugal and the Netherlands. A white cravat showed un- 
der his dark-blue coat. From his shoulders a short blue 
cloak floated in the air, and his buckskin breeches disappeared 
into a pair of high tasselled boots. 

At eight o'clock Napoleon was still leisurely breakfasting 
at Le Caillou on silver plate brought from the Tuileries. 
The sun was shining, and a wind was blowing on the marshy 
field. The Emperor was supremely confident that he would 
breakfast the next morning in Brussels. "We have ninety 
chances in our favour, and not ten against us," he declared. 

He announced that he would hurl Wellington back upon 
his base at Ostend or at Antwerp — drive him into the sea, 
as he expressed it. "I shall bring my numerous artillery into 
play, charge with my cavalry and then I shall march with 
my Old Guard." He had no thought that the Prussians, 
whom he had beaten at Ligny two days before, might rally 
and confront him again that day. 

Marshal Soult had pressed the Emperor the night before 
to call in at least some of the 33,000 men with Grouchy, and 
he urged the point anew at the breakfast table. The Em- 
peror only scorned his prudence. "Because Wellington has 
beaten you, you regard him as a great general," he chided 
his chief of staff. "But let me tell you now that Welling- 
ton is a poor general, and that the English are poor soldiers, 
and that for me this affair here is no more than eating this 
breakfast. ' ' 

Thus the Emperor sat at table, routing the foe with knife 
and fork, while his troops were forming on the heights of 
La Belle Alliance. It was about nine when he appeared be- 
fore them and for the last time held a review of his army. 

The eagle crowned standards fluttered in the breeze. The 
sun gleamed on sabres and lances, on helmets and cuirasses 
and lit up the brilliant medley of bright red, sky blue and 
deep green uniforms. Plumes of all the rainbow hues nodded 
above the shakos, the tiger helmets and huge bearskin caps. 
The grenadiers and chasseurs of the Old Guard, with pow- 
dered queues and enormous gold earrings, and with the most 



436 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

ferocious moustaches they could grow or even paste on their 
lips, carried in their knapsacks their full-dress uniforms in 
readiness for a triumphant entry into Brussels the next day. 

Dressed in his long grey coat, the Emperor rode down the 
frenzied ranks in full view of the red line of England, less 
than a mile away. Wellington, through his field glasses, 
followed the imperial progress, and the cheers of the French 
broke in ringing waves upon the British front. Not a shot 
was fired to interrupt the imposing spectacle, more like a 
gala entry into the bull ring than the inauguration of a battle 
for the mastery of Europe. 

The stage on which Napoleon enacted that closing scene in 
the pageantry of his career is not greatly changed after the 
passing of a century. True, the Belgians have defaced the 
field by heaping up an enormous mound of earth 200 feet 
high and placing a huge lion on top of it. Half a dozen other 
more modest memorials rise here and there and the ground 
is more or less cluttered with inns and shops. The wooded 
background of "Wellington's army has vanished, while the 
sunken road has half disappeared, and now a tramway runs 
along it. 

Notwithstanding these latter-day intrusions, however, the 
field of Waterloo is still the same checkerboard of small, 
well-tended farms, dotted with the same villages, as when 
the battle burst upon it. One who stands to-day on La Belle 
Alliance, needs to put forth only a slight effort of the 
imagination to call back the shades of the two warring armies, 
victor and vanquished, and see them again facing each other 
in serried lines. 

Like Austerlitz, Waterloo was not fought in Waterloo, but 
two and three miles south of that village, which itself is only 
ten miles out of Brussels. And, unlike most battles, it was 
not for the possession of a fortress, a river or a mountain 
pass. 

It was a fight to capture a country wagon road, which, like 
a main aisle, runs through the very centre of the battlefield. 
From La Belle Alliance, where the French troops were drawn 
up, this road dips down into the narrow, tumbling valley, 



WATERLOO 437 

which divided the two armies on the battle morning, and 
ascends the opposite height to Mt. St. Jean, on whose southern 
slope Wellington's troops awaited the advance of their foe. 

By being the first on the scene the night before, the Duke 
had won the toss for the choice of positions and he exercised 
his advantage with good tactical judgment. He well knew 
where he was going when he retired from Quatre Bras, for 
he had examined Mt. St. Jean while passing by, a year be- 
fore. The original discoverer of Waterloo, however, was, of 
all men, Hudson Lowe. At least he was among the first to 
commend its military advantages. 

When Wellington posted his troops, he cleverly took ad- 
vantage of every favourable condition in a most remarkable 
battlefield. Down close to the foot of La Belle Alliance, and 
at the western end of this tilting ground of the nations, rise 
the shattered walls of the old chateau of Hougoumont. 
They are covered with wounds and the very trees are battle 
scarred. Out in the centre beside the Brussels road, is a 
group of buildings within a high stone wall. These are the 
farmhouse and sheds of La Haye Sainte. At the eastern 
end of the field is the little hamlet of Papelotte with two 
other hamlets near by. 

Wellington seized upon all those buildings, garrisoned them, 
cut loopholes in them and turned them into forts. Thus the 
stone walls of Hougoumont and Papelotte became in effect 
the brass knuckles on the right and left fists of John Bull, 
while La Haye Sainte served him as a breastplate in his finish 
fight with Napoleon. For it was behind those fortified out- 
posts that the Briton formed his battle line, which stretched 
nearly three miles from west to east, from Hougoumont to 
Papelotte, with La Haye Sainte in the very centre. 

Not only did Wellington shield his troops behind that 
strange chain of improvised fortresses. He posted them 
back of the road to Wavre, which was most peculiarly con- 
trived to protect them. A high, thick hedge bordered the 
easterly reach of the highway, where it formed a good screen, 
and to the west the road sank fully six feet below the field, a 
perfect intrenchment ready made. 



438 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Back of the road, the Duke stood his soldiers on the slope 
of Mt. St. Jean, where in every attack the enemy had an up- 
hill task. He also made the hill serve him in still another 
way, its crest snugly sheltering and indeed quite concealing 
his reserves and wounded. 

The two armies were not very unequal in numbers. Al- 
though Wellington used to say that Napoleon on the battle- 
field was worth 40,000 men, the Iron Duke himself was no 
small reinforcement to any army he commanded. In the out- 
lines of their lives, the two chieftains were strangely matched. 
Both were born on conquered islands within a few months 
of each other; both were educated in French military schools 
at the same time; both received their commissions and made 
their first campaigns in the same years. Although their 
paths never had crossed until they met on the Brussels road, 
the Briton had for six years fought the marshals of the Na- 
poleonic school in Spain, and there, in 1814, the Irishman 
was winning his dukedom while the Corsican was losing his 
crown. 

Napoleon had a few more and Wellington a few less than 
70,000 troops. The most marked disparity between the forces 
was in artillery, the Emperor having 260 guns against the 
Duke's 180. 

While Napoleon, however, was well satisfied with his army, 
which was wholly French and fiercely patriotic, Wellington 
described his own, even after the victory, as "the worst 
equipped army with the worst staff ever brought together." 
It is true that nearly two-thirds of his soldiers were untrained. 
The rest had seen more or less active sendee in the Spanish 
campaign, but the best of the Peninsular veterans were lost 
or still absent on the New Orleans expedition. 

There were only 23,991 British, all told, at Waterloo, just 
about one-third of the total fighting force. More than 
20,000 of Wellington's men were from Holland and Belgium, 
and more than 20,000 were Hanoverians and mercenaries from 
other German states. 

With such a hodge-podge army, Wellington would not 
have dared fight Napoleon at AYaterloo had he not been as- 



WATERLOO 439 

sured that another army larger than his own was less than 
ten miles away and hurrying to his assistance. While 
Grouchy, with his 33,000 French, was actually marching 
farther away from Napoleon, Marshal Bliicher, "that old 
devil," as the Emperor called his most persistent and 
troublesome foe in arms, had been dragging his weary Prus- 
sians through the mud and making straight for Waterloo. 
Wellington accepted battle, therefore, on the confident ex- 
pectation that before the end of the day, he would outnum- 
ber his adversary two to one. 

Even while the battle was beginning, Grouchy was sending 
a message to the Emperor, announcing that he hoped to ar- 
rive at Wavre in the evening, where he would place himself 
between Bliicher and Wellington, "who is, I presume, re- 
treating before Your Majesty!" And he asked what he 
should do to-morrow. He did not know, poor plodding mar- 
shal, that Bliicher was fast placing himself between him and 
Napoleon and that there would be no to-morrow for the army 
of France. 

It was almost noon when one of his "beautiful daughters," 
as Napoleon fondly called his twelve-pounders, tossed the ball 
that signalised the opening of a battle of untold, unending 
consequences. 

That first outburst of thunder from the batteries on La 
Belle Alliance was for the purpose of covering an attack 
upon Hougoumont, which Prince Jerome Bonaparte led with 
reckless daring. Out of the loopholes in the garden walls 
of the chateau, flames of fire shot into the faces of the ad- 
vancing French from the muskets of the invisible British 
garrison. Twice Jerome and his 12,000 men dashed heads 
down into the blinding storm. When retreat was sounded, 
after a costly sacrifice, the bodies of the dead who had died 
in vain lay in heaps about the stubborn walls. 

The Emperor had ordered the attack merely to divert 
Wellington's attention from the British centre where he had 
meant to deal his hardest blow. But while he was yet making 
ready for that deadly thrust, he discerned a cloud of dust on 
the eastern horizon, which soon took the shape of an advanc- 



440 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

ing column of troops. Soon a scouting party brought in a 
captured Prussian courier, with a message to the British 
from General Billow of Bliicher's army announcing that he 
was marching with 30,000 men to attack the right wing of 
the French. 

Biilow, however, was yet a Long way off and when the Em- 
peror had scut a courier to Grouchy, ordering him to come 
iu behind Biilow, who would thus be caught between two 
French armies, he merely revised the gambling odds. "This 
morning we had ninety points in our favour.'* he said; "we 
still have sixty against forty." He did not calculate that 
Bliicher, too, was comin<_ r niton him. Nor did he know that 
his order to Grouchy would not be delivered until five o'clock, 
too late to be of any use even had the absent marshal not 
been hotly engaged at that hour with a division of Prussians 
left behind ;it Wavre. 

Returning to his duel with Wellington, Napoleon now 
launched hi* bolt at the British centre. It was one-thirty 
when 20,000 French, under a protecting shed of flames from 
eighty guns, raced across the field, the standing rye falling 
before them as before a reaping machine. A detachment 
turned aside to storm La Have Sainte and attempt the cap- 
ture of that stronghold, while the great body of advancing 
troops started up the slippery side of St. .ban. Some Dutch 
and Belgians, whom Wellington had posted in front, broke 
and fled across the Wavre road and broke upon the British 
Lines. 

As the French mounted the muddy slope in pursuit of the 
fleeing enemy, however, they themselves became a confused 
mass. Suddenly the British sprang up from their ambuscade 
behind the roadside hedges and fired at forty paces. Then 
came a savage hand to hand encounter which ended in the 
rout of the French column. 

At the same time another attacking column met its sur- 
prise farther along where the road suddenly sank below the 
surface of the field. There the cuirassiers, leading the right 
of the column, unexpectedly found themselves at the brink 



WATERLOO 441 

of the strange declivity. The undaunted horsemen took the 
leap down into the road, but as they were spurring their 
horses up the opposite bank, they saw only thirty feet before 
them a body of British Foot Guards, descending at a furi- 
ous pace The French wheeled and fled along the treacher- 
ous ravine to the Brussels road, whence they escaped from the 

^Everywhere up and down the field, the blue line of France 
was rolled back, and Ponsonby's brigade made a return 
charge up the side of La Belle Alliance. There the traces of 
forty of Napoleon's cannon were cut before the audacious 
Britons could be beaten back by the French lancers, one of 
whom thrust a fatal spear into the breast of the gallant Pon- 

S °The Emperor's first blow had utterly failed. After three 
hours and a half of fighting the contending armies were in 
their original positions. The rye field, its golden yellow 
crimson-dyed, had become a graveyard. But the red line of 
Britain and the blood-drenched walls of Hougoumont and 
La Haye Sainte had all withstood the onset. 

Napoleon, nervously pinching his snuff, was fully aroused 
now to the perils that were fast closing in upon him He 
knew that the Prussians already were forming behind the 
screen of the Wood of Paris and another message from 
Grouchy had dashed his hope that the marshal was at their 

Retreat might have been prudent. But whither? Face 
Paris, with its coldly unsympathetic corps legis latif ? * ace 
France, with its disaffected and rebellious population 

No- Napoleon's only refuge was victory. He must hasten 
to break the British centre before the Prussians came. Un- 
der a cannonade that shook the earth and cracked the skies, 
5000 French horsemen plunged down La Belle Alliance, 
loped across the valley and spurred up the still muddy slope 
of Mt. St. Jean. There they rode over the British gunners 
but broke like an ocean wave against the squares of British 
infantry. Again and again they were beaten off. Another 



442 IX THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

drove of 5000 horses swept up the hill and still another drove 
of 5000 dashed through the hurricane of iron and fire and 
spent itself upon the steel girt squares. 

"Will those English never show us their backs?" Napo- 
leon impatiently exclaimed, as he lowered his field glasses. 
Four times [Marshal Ney, with increasing madness, sent his 
horsemen upon Mt. St. Jean and four times they recoiled as 
from an oven door. They were the must magnificent charges 
in the spectacle of warfare, and the most futile, since they 
were neither preceded dot supported b\ infantry. 

Meanwhile Hongoumont was enveloped in smoke. Its 
defenders had been driven from the garden into the chateau. 
Soon its walls were ablaze Prom the fire of the French howit- 
zers, and the British tied to some small detached buildings, 
which they held to the last against sword and flame. The 
fire spread to the chapel, but stopped at a statue of the Virgin 
which is reverently shown there to this day. 

The French captured La Have Sainte, that citadel in front 
of the British centre. It was then, if ever, that Wellington 
pleaded with fortune. "Bliicher or nighl !" His red line was 
sagging from the successive blows that had been rained upon 
it. Here and there were yawning 'japs hewn by the lances 
of France, and disorder ruled in the British rear, where the 
stragglers from the front filled the Forest of Soignes with a 
babel of tongues. 

Ney's attack was even worse spent than the British re- 
sistance. He hurried a courier up to La Belle Alliance not 
far from six o'clock with an appeal for infantry. "Infan- 
try." the Emperor exclaimed. "Where shall I get any? 
Would you have me make them?" 

The battle between Napoleon and Wellington really had 
come to an end an hour before. And the Duke had won. 
For he had undertaken to do no more than stand his ground 
until the Prussians came. 

When, some time before four o'clock, the head of Billow's 
column emerged from the Wood of Paris and marched against 
the French right, Napoleon had abandoned the British to 
Ney and left him with only 40,000 men to face the more than 



WATERLOO 443 

50,000 soldiers that Wellington still had. For the Emperor 
had to take a large body of men from his front to save his 
flank from the Prussians at Planchenoit. 

The spire of the church of Planchenoit still looks out over 
the field of Waterloo. In the morning of that battle Sunday, 
the priest had said mass at its altar. In the afternoon, its 
yard was reddened with the blood of Gaul and Teuton, the 
combat raging fiercest about its walls. As early as four 
thirty, this second battle began with 30,000 Prussians against 
the 20,000 French, whose vanguard was the Fifth of the line, 
the battalion that the Emperor had conquered with a glance 
in the defile of Laffrey as he marched back from Elba. 
Planchenoit changed masters with lightning rapidity as the 
village was taken and retaken. At last the French held it 
so well in hand that the Emperor could turn upon Welling- 
ton again at seven o'clock. 

The early summer sun still granted him a respite of two 
hours when he rode down into the valley, where from La Have 
Sainte, his eye swept the thin and jagged British line. But 
there remained to him only 3500 of his Guard. Behind that 
fragment of his invincible corps, he gathered the wreckage of 
his army, putting in his last man for one supreme, desperate 
effort to turn the tide. 

While he was preparing for the attack, a captain of carabi- 
neers deserted his ranks and raced ahead through the hail of 
shot and shell straight toward the enemy. Raising his right 
hand as he drew near the British, the traitor cried out: 
"Long live the King of England!" The redcoats lowered 
their guns before their strange visitor, who now shouted: 
' ' Get ready ! Napoleon, the scoundrel, will be upon you with 
his Guard in less than half an hour ! ' ' 

The British line closed up and braced itself for the assault. 
Even Napoleon himself might come, for Blucher, too, was 
coming, as every bulldog in the pack well knew. 

Forward moved the little band of French. Even as they 
went, the van of Blucher 's Prussians burst upon the scene 
from Papelotte. A thrill of panic ran through the slender 
ranks of the advancing column of French as they looked into 



444 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

the barrels of Wellington's muzzles in front of them, heard 
Biilow still pounding upon their flank and saw Bliicher mov- 
ing upon their right. 

The ringing tones of the master's voice rallied them and 
aroused their Gallic spirit. Couriers were sent over the field 
to spread the cheering delusion that Grouchy, too, was com- 
ing. Now the Guard went forward as steady as if on re- 
view, led by Ney, his face begrimed with powder, his sword 
broken, his hat and coat rent by bullets. As he went, the 
marshal's horse was shot from under him for the fifth time 
that afternoon and the marshal rolled on the ground; but, 
struggling to his feet and waving his broken sword, he 
marched on afoot. 

When the French came within 200 yards, the British can- 
non flamed in their faces. Yet the charging battalions did 
not bend before the yawning guns, but drowned their roar 
with shouts of "Vive ['Empereur." Sweeping over the Brit- 
ish batteries, and, sniffing victory at last, they rushed on with 
quickening pace. 

Division commanders cried out to Wellington for reinforce- 
ments to save their troops from destruction. But he had 
none to give. "Let them all die," the Iron Duke replied as 
he stood by the elm tree beside the Brussels road. "Hold 
on to the very last man, so as to give the Prussians time to 
come up." 

The French now, near eight o'clock, were close upon the 
Duke himself when he gave the memorable command, 
"Stand up Guards and make ready!" The British Foot 
Guards, who had been lying in wait, sprang from the earth 
like dragons' teeth and opened a murderous fire at sixty 
paces. Still, leaping over their own dead and wounded, on 
came the Gauls to hurl themselves against the pitiless steel, 
and then stagger back. 

In that instant when the Old Guard recoiled, the name of 
Waterloo became forever a synonym not of victory but of 
defeat. 

The death cry of the Empire rang out on the evening air : 
"The Guard gives way!" "The Guard gives way!" For 



WATERLOO 445 

the first time on any field, that lamentation ran through the 
ranks of France, as the stricken Guard reeled back, caught in 
a demoralising cross fire from the victorious foes who 
swarmed about it. 

Blucher's Prussians were now getting into action and fast 
working in behind the French, when Wellington rose in his 
stirrups and waved his cocked hat. At that signal, the whole 
British army poured down Mt. St. Jean and fell upon the 
staggering foe. 

Not far from the spot where France has planted a memorial 
sculpture of a wounded eagle, Napoleon, sitting on his little 
white horse by the wall of La Haye Sainte, strove once more 
and for the last time, to form a martial line. He had only 
one round of shot left for his battery. But he pieced to- 
gether a few broken fragments of the Guard and ranging 
them in three squares for an orderly retreat, he took his 
place in the centre of one of them. 

As those frail squares retreated across the valley, with 
the huge British squares pounding against them like batter- 
ing rams, they grew thinner and thinner. Soon Napoleon 
left them, and with a few chasseurs fled the lost field, bitterly 
to lament in after time, "Waterloo! Waterloo! It is there I 
should have died!" 

A British officer yelled to the Guard to surrender. Its 
commander, Cambronne, was a rude, uncouth son of Mars, 
who, as a fighting man, had succeeded La Tour d'Auvergne 
in the honourary post of the first grenadier of France. His 
reply to the Briton was not at all the polite and even noble 
observation, "The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders!" 
which a Parisian journalist substituted for the unprintable 
original. Yet that was what Cambronne should have said, 
for that was his spirit. He and the Guard slashed a path 
to the height of La Belle Alliance. Then he fell from a ball 
that struck him in the face and became a captive in the hands 
of the foe. 

As Marshal Ney had been the first to advance, he was de- 
termined to be the last to retreat. In the midst of the wild 
rout, he implored the soldiers as they raced by him to stop 



446 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

and turn their faces to the enemy. But life still held its 
lure for others, though not for him. 

"If you and I escape," Ney warned Count d'Erlon, "we 
shall be hanged." Even his hat and his epaulettes were gone 
now, when, brandishing his broken sword, he rallied his men 
for one more stand. 

"Come, my friends," he shouted, "come on, and see a 
marshal of France die!" But an unkind fate had decreed 
that he should not die like a marshal of France. In vain he 
wooed death beside the Brussels road, but only to be caught 
in the undertow of the ebbing tide of the Empire and swept 
on to an ignominious fate. 

The British moved across the valley and mounted La Belle 
Alliance, where the Prussians joined them. There Welling- 
ton and Prince Blueher rejoiced together in victory. The 
Duke's forces were too badly winded to continue the pursuit 
of Napoleon, and the hard-hating old Prince welcomed the 
task of bagging the eagle of Jena. Besides he had left his 
pipe in Paris on the last campaign and lie wished to recover 
it. 

As Wellington passed over the field on his way to his sleep- 
ing quarters at Waterloo, the moon burst through the clouds 
and lit up the pallid faces of the fallen, who lay in windrows 
at the foot of Mt. St. Jean. The gardens and houses of 
Ilougoumont and La Haye Sainte were crowded with the 
dead, and the well of the old chateau was all but filled with 
the bodies that had been tumbled into it to clear the ground 
for the fighting. 

The losses in the battle were fairly equal. The French 
killed, wounded, and captured aggregated about 25,000, or 
one-third of the force engaged. The British, themselves, 
lost 8500; the Hanoverians, Dutch and Belgians, 7500, and 
the Prussians 7000, or a total of 23,000 for the Allies. 
Among the wounded was Pozzo di Borgo, whose slight in- 
juries, however, did not restrain his rejoicing, "I have thrown 
the last shovelful of earth on Napoleon's coffin." 

With the shadow of Waterloo on his brow and in the silence 
of despair, Napoleon rode through the night, his bridle reins 



WATERLOO 447 

fallen from his hand and lying on the neck of his horse. 
At midnight he passed over the battlefield of Quatre Bras, 
where the moon rested like a spotlight upon the bodies of 
the dead, stripped naked by the ghouls of war and denied 
either a grave or a shirt to cover them. 

Arriving at Charleroi at daybreak, he freed himself from 
the wretched mob of 40,000 to hasten to Paris. His treasure 
wagon was cast aside, and the populace and the drunken sol- 
diery plundered its bags of gold. The imperial coach was 
abandoned and in it a lot of diamonds, which a Prussian 
major claimed as his booty. 

As Napoleon re-entered France and left the night of horror 
behind him, he took heart to argue, ' ' All is not lost. ' ' But a 
rumour of the catastrophe sped on before him, and a strange 
hush rested upon the people as the fallen Colossus passed by. 



CHAPTER L 

THE CAPTIVE EAGLE 

1815 AGE 45-46 

ARRIVING in Paris the third morning after Waterloo, 
with the pallor of a great calamity in his face and a 
tumult of emotions in his breast, Napoleon alighted be- 
fore the Elysee palace. He was still covered with the dust of 
the battle and the rout. His staff were excited and red eyed, 
their clothes blood-stained and torn by bullets and sabres. 

There was no appeal from the verdict of Waterloo. Napo- 
leon complained that if he had been the King of England in- 
stead of Emperor of the French, he could have lust the battle 
without losing a vote in parliament. Waterloo was more 
than a battle lost. It was a catastrophe, a debacle. 

It was no mere misadventure, no unlucky accident. It 
was not lost so much by Bliicher's chancing to join Welling- 
ton as by the junction of those ever invincible allies, cause and 
effect. On that fatal field, Napoleon reaped the whirlwind. 
All the mistakes and faults of his life rose before him, as be- 
fore a drowning man, and inflicted upon him their inexorable 
penalty. Waterloo was more a moral than a military dis- 
aster. 

The Emperor never felt more fit than on the morning of 
the battle. Never on any field had he more gladly, more con- 
fidently drawn his sword. As he himself enthusiastically 
testified, his army surpassed itself in valour. For twelve 
hours of daylight, he had the heaviest battalions on his side, 
with more men, more cannon, and more horses than Welling- 
ton. But in the blindness of self-confidence, he who had 
laughed at the Pyrenees and the Alps, at rivers and deserts, 
idled away nine hours because of a little mud that would not 
have been suffered to delay a football game. 

448 



THE CAPTIVE EAGLE 449 

If he had to fight three battles at once, it was only because 
he neglected his opportunity to fight them one at a time. 
From sunrise until four-thirty in the afternoon, Wellington 
alone stood before him. Billow's Prussians did not come 
up until four-thirty. It was seven-thirty and later before 
Bliicher's army appeared on the field. 

Now, when, for the fourth time in four years, the Emperor 
returned to Paris in defeat and without an army, patriots 
despairingly turned away from him and time-servers shunned 
the victim of ill luck. "Why," Fouche complained, "the 
gamester can 't even win a play any more ! ' ' While that im- 
mortal sleuth crept about, plotting to make himself the Tal- 
leyrand, the manager of this second downfall, the corps 
legistatif listened to the disinterested councils of Lafayette 
and undertook to assume the control of the government. All 
factions sought by disowning and discarding Napoleon to 
appease the Allies and arrest their march on Paris. 

At noon of his second day in Paris, the one-time master of 
Europe received the blunt notice that the legislative bodies 
gave him an hour to lay down the sceptre. Once more he 
took up his pen to write an act of abdication. A pro- 
visional government of five was established by the legisla- 
tors, with Carnot and Caulaincourt among its members and 
the feline Fouche as its president. While that body sat in 
state at the Tuileries, the dethroned monarch lingered on in 
the Elysee, almost a stranger at the seat of his Empire. 

Fouche could not sit easy in his chair while the master 
whom he had so often betrayed remained only a few hundred 
feet away. He must exorcise the ghost in the Elysee, and it 
was Marshal Davout who accepted the delicate task of order- 
ing away from Paris the man who had made him the Prince 
of Eckmiihl. 

The captor of the capitals of Europe retreated from his 
own capital the Sunday after the Battle of Waterloo. As he 
went, he passed by the Arch of Triumph, the arch of his star, 
which looked down upon him only to deride his fallen for- 
tunes. 

The late lord of the Tuileries, of Fontainebleau, of Com- 



450 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

piegne, of Rambouillet no longer had a roof that he could 
call his own. No doubt there were still friends who would 
welcome him to their homes. lie knew, however, that their 
hospitality to him probably would mean their ruin under the 
returning Bourbons. 

In that plight he thought of only one refuge. If he went 
to Malmaison, which he had given to Josephine, surely no one 
would punish Ilortense for opening its doors to him. When 
he left Paris, therefore, he drove to that chateau of the bril- 
liant days of the Consulate, when all the world was young. 
But he knew that even that shelter would be denied him in 
a few days. He was not only subject to Fouche's orders, 
but the Allies were moving down the valley of the Oise on 
their march to Paris, far more intent on capturing him than 
on taking the city. 

Marshal Blucher thirsted for his blood and longed to shoot 
him at the head of his Prussian columns. The Duke of Wel- 
lington objected to any such summary action. "Napoleon 
does not belong to you nor to me," the Duke argued, "but to 
our sovereigns, who will decide his fate in the name of 
Europe. Should they require an executioner, I shall re- 
quest them to seek some other than me, and I advise you, for 
the sake of your fame, to follow my example." 

Captivity or flight was the choice presented to Napoleon. 
He rejected suicide as a means of escape, and scorned a char- 
acteristic suggestion from Fouche that he sneak off in dis- 
guise. Most of his advisers urged him to seek asylum in the 
United States; Queen Hortense suggested that he should 
trust himself to his father-in-law, the Emperor of Austria. 
Caulaincourt proposed that he should choose Russia and accept 
the protection of his old friend, the Czar Alexander. 

Napoleon himself strongly preferred England. "Give my- 
self up to Austria?" he said. "Never. She has seized upon 
my wife and my son. Give myself up to Russia? That 
would be to one man only. But to give myself up to Eng- 
land — that would be to throw myself upon a people." 

He had reason enough not to seek the hospitality of any 
of the countries he had conquered. Caulaincourt feared that 



THE CAPTIVE EAGLE 451 

even the English were too embittered by their long struggle 
against him to give him a generous welcome. "Then, as I 
am refused the society of men," he replied, "I shall betake 
myself to the bosom of nature and enjoy the solitude that 
suits my last thoughts." Thus he expressed his decision to 
go to America, which he seemed to regard as a semisavage 
wilderness. 

As the banished monarch prepared to depart with the little 
company that had volunteered to share his exile, Queen Hor- 
tense, who had presided over his home throughout the Hun- 
dred Days and who was his hostess at Malmaison, insisted 
on his receiving from her a diamond necklace as the last tes- 
timonial of her devotion. The necklace could- be easily car- 
ried and concealed, and in case of need, its stones would bring 
him $40,000. 

Cardinal Fesch and Mme. Mere came, as to the cell of the 
condemned, to say good-bye. The memory of Josephine, which 
had haunted him throughout his stay at Malmaison, received 
the exile's last farewell. Alone in her room he held com- 
munion with the spirit of the dead as he himself was about 
to enter into a living death. 

Out on the lawn at Malmaison, a stone has been cherished 
now for a century. Upon that carriage block, Napoleon took 
his last step at the chateau and his first step into exile, when, 
in the waning of the tenth day after Waterloo, he entered the 
carriage that was to bear him away from scenes so happily 
associated with his vanished hopes and his vanished glory. 

Driving to the imperial chateau of Rambouillet, he slept 
for the last time beneath a palace roof. The next day he re- 
sumed his journey, which led him through Tours and Niort 
to the naval port of Rochefort, on the Bay of Biscay. 

Now as ever when he turned his face to the water, he was 
confronted with the wooden walls of England, whose ubiqui- 
tous ships lay at the harbour mouth. Driven forth from the 
land, even the ocean refused him a haven. 

Various and equally doubtful projects were presented for 
running the British blockade. Napoleon's pride rejected the 
proposal of a Danish captain to conceal him in a barrel 



452 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

aboard a merchant vessel, and he hesitated to risk a running 
fight through the blockading fleet, which a French naval cap- 
tain offered to undertake. Joseph Bonaparte besought him 
to profit by their close resemblance and take the cabin he had 
engaged aboard an American ship, sailing from Bordeaux. 
Napoleon, however, would not consent to seek safety for him- 
self at the sacrifice of his brother 's. 

In the midst of that confusion of counsels, he received 
peremptory orders to move on once more. On the very day 
when Louis XVIII re-entered the Tuileries at Paris, the de- 
throned sovereign went to the village of Fouras, which sits 
on the outermost headland of the coast. There on the pier 
of Fouras, some loyal hand has carved the name of Napoleon 
to mark the last spot on the mainland of France which the 
outcast Emperor trod before he boarded the French frigate 
Saalc, and accepted the only refuge left him beneath his flag. 

Presumably the Bourbons, if he had fallen into their hands, 
would not have been any more lenient than the Prussians. 
They did not hesitate to stand Marshal Ney up against the 
garden wall of the Luxembourg and shoot down that "brav- 
est of the brave ' ' in the Grand Army because he had followed 
his soldiers in their break to the Emperor. Labedoyere, the 
enthusiastic young officer who delivered his regiment over 
to the Emperor as he was marching on Grenoble, met the 
same extreme punishment for breaking his oath of allegiance 
to Louis XVIII, and Lavalette, Napoleon's old-time staff of- 
ficer, whom he married to one of Hortense's schoolmates at 
Mine. Campan's, was saved from a like fate only by the clev- 
erness and courage of his beautiful wife. Mme. Lavalette, 
having smuggled herself into her husband's prison and 
changed clothes with him, took his place in the cell while 
he made good his escape. But the ordeal quite upset the 
reason of the plucky and devoted woman and left her hope- 
lessly mad the rest of her days. 

Another tragedy of the downfall was the death of Murat. 
The fugitive King of Naples, rebuffed by Napoleon from the 
shores of France, tried to emulate the Emperor's return from 
Elba. But he had no sooner landed on the coast of his former 



THE CAPTIVE EAGLE 453 

kingdom than he was arrested. Being tried on the spot and 
sentenced to death, he stood before the firing squad with an 
appeal that was characteristic at once of his weakness and his 
strength: "Spare my face and fire at my heart." 

All the while Napoleon's own original choice of throwing 
himself upon the British nation was only gaining in strength. 
He had always known England as the inviolable sanctuary of 
unfortunate monarchs and patriots. He had seen it shelter 
the Bourbons from the storms of the Revolution and of the 
Empire. In his Corsican youth he had revered it as the pro- 
tector and host of Paoli, and had his mother not resisted his 
father's wish to accompany that island chieftain, he himself 
would have been born under its protection. 

He knew, of course, that Paoli or Louis XVIII had not, 
like himself, been an enemy of England. But he would not 
go to her as the warrior and monarch who had fought her 
for twenty years. He would even change his name and call 
himself Colonel Muiron or General Duroc after one or the 
other of those friends who had fallen by his side. If, how- 
ever, England should turn him away, he could still adopt his 
second choice and go to America. 

Two of his retinue, Savary and Las Cases, were sent to the 
British ship Bellerophon to sound its commander, Captain 
Maitland. In his natural eagerness to have the credit of 
delivering Napoleon over to the government at London, the 
captain was most cordial if not specific in his assurances. 
He did not make it his business to tell his visitors that he had 
been ordered to "take Bonaparte" if he could and "bring 
him to the nearest English port in all possible haste and 
secrecy." 

But Napoleon himself very well knew that his fate did not 
rest in the hands of a naval captain, and before he went 
aboard the Bellerophon, he made this eloquent appeal to 
George IV, Prince Regent of England: 

Tour Royal Highness: 

Exposed to the factions which divide my country and the hatred 
of the principal powers of Europe, I have terminated my political 
career, and I come, like Themistocles, to seat myself beside the hearth 



454 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

of the British nation. I place myself under the protection of its 
laws, which I claim from your Royal Highness as the most power- 
ful, the most constant and the most generous of my enemies. 

Napoleon - . 

Having despatched that message by a special vessel, which 
Maitland provided, he lingered only one more day beneath 
the tricoloured flag. It is fitting that his last day in France 
should have been the 14th of July, the fete day of the nation. 
For the fall of the Bastille six and twenty years before opened 
an era which had closed with the fall of his Empire. 

On the day after the national holiday, one last cry of "Vive 
TEmpereur" rang out sadly from the crew of the French 
ship as Napoleon grasped the ladder of the Bellerophon and, 
with brow unclouded, passed under the British flag. Al- 
though he was not received with a salute by the guns, Captain 
Maitland greeted him as Emperor and gave him his cabin. 

The captive was not long in conquering the sympathies of 
his captor. Maitland appears to have found him a delight- 
ful and fascinating guest, and he heard not a complaining 
word from him. He walked the deck a good deal. Often he 
stood alone and silent, his followers respectfully standing 
apart and at a distance while he gazed upon the unconquered 
and conquering sea. He seemed, however, to have difficulty 
in keeping awake, and the only book the captain saw him 
reading was a biography of the son of another revolution — 
Washington. 

After voyaging northward a week, the Bellerophon sighted 
the lonely, heather-clad tors of Dartmoor. Soon the beauti- 
ful, outstretched arms of Torbay received the monarch who 
was sailing away from a throne, even as a century and a quar- 
ter before they had welcomed William of Orange to a throne. 
The bay is so Italian in its soft loveliness that it seems alien 
to the stern Devon coast, and it took Napoleon by surprise. 
As his eye roved entranced from Brixham to Torquay, he 
remarked, "It is like a Mediterranean harbour — as beautiful 
as the harbour of Portoferrajo. ' ' He was to see little enough 
thenceforth in his second exile to remind him of the beauties 
of his first. 



THE CAPTIVE EAGLE 455 

After lying at anchor for two days the Bellerophon pro- 
ceeded to Plymouth. As Napoleon found himself sailing 
westward and farther away from London he could not miss 
the probable meaning of this movement. 

At the Plymouth anchorage, the Bellerophon was sur- 
rounded and guarded by armed picket craft and the harbour 
was almost covered with the boats of the curious. People 
eagerly swarmed from distant parts of the kingdom to the old 
town by the Plym. Sometimes there were as many as 1000 
boats with 8000 occupants crowded about the Bellerophon, 
struggling, clamouring, and even risking their lives to catch 
a glimpse of the foremost man of the world walking the deck 
in captivity. 

There was an ominous absence of official callers and official 
information aboard. A dread of imprisonment in the Tower 
of London arose among the French. Out of the dark cloud 
of mystery there came whispered hints of St. Helena. 

The government harshly interpreted the darkest passions of 
the hour. It is doubtful if any cabinet, however magnanimous 
its sentiments might have been, would have dared to dally 
with so high an explosive as Napoleon still was supposed to 
be. As his custodian, England not only owed a duty to her- 
self but also had to consider her Allies, one of whom, at 
least, would have joyed in shooting him down like a mad 
dog. 

No one could have known then, as all should be able to see 
now, that he was an extinct volcano. His power to shake the 
earth had come from the people and he had lost it. His race 
was run, his course of conquest was finished and he had but a 
few years to live. 

All that is hindsight. And it would have been unreason- 
able to expect any foresight in the Tory lords, who con- 
trolled the British ministry of the day. The monarchs of 
Europe had from time to time made terms with Napoleon, 
but the aristocracies never had relented in their rage against 
the scourge of feudalism and class privilege. When they 
unhorsed the giant and bound him, therefore, they imagined 
they had overthrown and caught the French Revolution itself. 



456 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

After four days of suspense aboard the Bellerophon in 
Plymouth harbour, a suspense which the central figure bore 
without any outward sign of the strain, Admiral Lord Keith 
appeared. Entering Napoleon's cabin, Keith read to him 
the order that "General Bonaparte" should be conveyed to 
St. Helena. 

The distinguished condemned made his protest quietly and 
in a few sentences. Apparently he did nothing to render the 
task of his visitor more difficult, for after the interview Keith 
exclaimed: "Damn the fellow! If he had obtained an in- 
terview with His Royal Highness (the Prince Regent"), in 
half an hour they would have been the best friends in Eng- 
land." 

The orders of the government allowed the captive to choose 
three officers to be his companions and a physician to attend 
him in his captivity. "While the little company that had come 
with him on the Bellerophon awaited his selection, there 
never was a more anxious rivalry for his favour when he sat 
on the throne of France than there was now for the privilege 
of sharing his exile. 

When the time came for him to pass to the Northumber- 
land, which was detailed to carry him to St. Helena, those 
whom he had been obliged to omit from the list parted from 
him with demonstrations of grief. Savary burst into tears 
and threw himself at the feet of his master. He and General 
Lallemand, for supposed offences of their own, had been ex- 
cluded from the St. Helena party by the London cabinet and 
condemned to imprisonment in the island of Malta. 

"You see, my lord," said Las Cases to Admiral Keith, 
"that the only persons in tears are they who remain behind." 
Las Cases had gained a coveted place by accepting the post 
of secretary, and was added to the group of three officers, 
who were Bertrand, Montholon and Gourgaud. 

Before sailing, the members of the party, like any other 
prisoners about to be booked, were required to surrender 
their arms and valuables. No one insisted on taking Napo- 
leon's sword, however, and while the baggage of all was ran- 
sacked, there was no search of the person. The exiles were 



THE CAPTIVE EAGLE 457 

enabled thus to conceal on themselves some gold coin and 
jewels. 

For full ten weeks the Northumberland and her fleet of 
lesser vessels sailed southward. As they were passing down 
the coast of France, the French eagerly watched for a glimpse 
of their native land. Several times a vague shadow appeared 
before their gaze, but only to vanish before it took form. At 
last the clouds parted and their eyes were gladdened by the 
sight of the sun shining on the shore of Brittany. As France 
faded and finally disappeared forever from his horizon, Napo- 
leon stood with bared head. 

Although his officials and servants bore themselves toward 
him as if he were still in the Tuileries and wearing the crown 
of Empire, Admiral Cockburn and his subordinates of the 
Northumberland studiously observed the instructions of their 
government and took great pains tc ignore the fact that he 
had ever been more than a general. 

The former Emperor, who had sat at table with nearly 
every reigning monarch, did not disdain to dine each day 
with the admiral and the ship's officers, where he alternately 
interrogated them on all manner of subjects and recounted 
his own experiences by flood and field. He walked the deck 
a good deal, often with the admiral, whose arm steadied him 
when the sea rolled. He was also in the habit of sitting on 
one of the guns, which the sailors christened "the Emperor's 
cannon." 

Most of the day was passed by him in his cabin, where he 
at once began to dictate his recollections to Las Cases. 
"Labour is the scythe of time," he said to his amanuensis, as 
they thus relieved the tedium of the long trip. His evenings 
were given over to cards with the admiral or his fellow trav- 
ellers in the general cabin. 

The ship paused at Madeira, but no one went ashore. 
Thenceforth land was not sighted again until one day a dark 
speck appeared in the sky. The larger it grew the blacker it 
became. It was St. Helena. At last the islander from the 
Mediterranean was at his journey's end in the wide solitude 
of the South Atlantic. 



CHAPTER LI 

ST. HELENA 

1815-1821 AGE 46-51 

AS the Northumberland drew near the end of her long 
trip, Napoleon watched the billows of the southern sea 
breaking upon the lonely shores of the last of the 
chain of islands that so fatefully mark the voyage of his life. 

Born on an island in the Mediterranean and crowned on 
an island in the Seine, he took his first wife from an island 
in the West Indies and won his second in a battle which he 
launched from an island in the Danube. For the possession 
of the island of Malta, he quarrelled with the island king- 
dom of Great Britain and lost a continent. Exiled first to 
the Island of Elba, he returned to challenge again his insular 
foe and, losing the battle once more, he now saw from the 
quarter deck of the Northumberland, the barren and black- 
ened sides of the island of St. Helena waiting to shut him in 
forever as within the grim walls of a prison. 

If he had found it consoling in his Elban exile, the year 
before, to overlook Europe from the windows of his retreat, 
St. Helena offered him no such consolation. It is like a raft 
anchored in mid-ocean. Its nearest neighbour, the island of 
Ascension, is 500 miles and more away, while it is 1200 miles 
west of Africa at the mouth of the Congo, 1700 miles east 
of South America and the coast of Brazil, nearly 4000 miles 
from Europe at the Strait of Gibraltar, and almost 5000 miles 
from Paris. 

Remote and alien as it seemed to him from the moment it 
first swam into his vision until at the end of five and a half 
years, his eyes were closed upon it in death, there was yet 

458 



ST. HELENA 459 

a ceitain kinship between him and the rock of his captivity. 
Even as the irresistible force of a violent social convulsion had 
lifted him above the level of mankind, so in some awful up- 
heaval of nature, the fire-scarred stone that forms the island 
of St. Helena had been torn from the ocean bed and heaped 
in a mountainous mass, whose jagged peaks pierce the clouds. 

A more solitary and melancholy eyrie could not have been 
chosen for the captive eagle. "With an area of forty-seven 
square miles, the island is only ten miles in length at the 
longest and seven miles wide at the widest. When the fallen 
monarch, who had ruled 60,000,000 people came, its popula- 
tion was less than 3000, mostly African slaves, Chinese, and 
East Indians, only one face in four being white. 

Napoleon went ashore on the twentieth anniversary of his 
entry into a post of command. For it was on the 16th of 
October, 1795, that he was appointed general-in-chief of the 
army of the interior in control of the city of Paris. And it 
was on the 16th of October, 1815, that he landed at James- 
town, the diamonds in the star of the Legion of Honour glit- 
tering through the dusk from the breast of his grey overcoat 
as, with Admiral Cockburn on one side of him and Bertrand, 
grand marshal of the palace, on the other, he walked to his 
lodgings in the village. 

Seated on the back of a little cape pony and escorted by 
the admiral, he rode away in the morning by a winding road 
hewn in the rugged side of the mountain, up out of the ravine 
in which Jamestown sits. When he had mounted to the sum- 
mit, the village port was lost to view and he looked upon the 
boundless spaces of the Atlantic. Before him lay the heath- 
ery plateau with its few squalid slave huts and its gnarled 
and stunted gum trees and the wild grey steeps of the south- 
ern slope of St. Helena. It was within that drear horizon 
that he was condemned to life imprisonment. 

After visiting and silently inspecting Longwood, a group 
of farm buildings which the British government had chosen 
for his residence, he turned back to wait until it could be 
repaired and furnished for his occupancy. On his outward 
ride he had seen from the road a little bungalow in a vale, 



460 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

surrounded with shady trees and blooming flowers, where the 
Balcombes, an English tradesman's family, had provided a 
pretty refuge from the torrid heat of Jamestown. It had 
seemed to him an oasis in a stony desert, and, with the con- 
sent of the admiral, he stopped to inquire if he could be 
sheltered there. 

The homeless Emperor, who had given laws to Europe from 
the palaces of Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Milan, Vienna and Mos- 
cow, asked only for the privilege of living in a summer house 
or garden pavilion out on the lawn at the Briars, as the Bal- 
combes called their place, and he was permitted to settle 
there at once. And although Jamestown was only a little 
more than a mile away, it never again saw him after he rode 
out of it that morning following his arrival in the island. 

December and the tropic summer had come when Long- 
wood was at last in readiness for him, and he entered upon his 
life tenancy of the place. This group of one-story buildings, 
mostly of stone, which his host, the British nation, had pro- 
vided for the comfort of its most celebrated guest, was only 
a big cow shed in the beginning and the manure still lay 
heaped beneath its wooden floors. From a trellised porch, 
one entered a rather large front room and passed through 
into what was called the salon, back of which was the dining- 
room, badly lighted only by a glass door. Opening out of 
the dining-room on one side was the library, and on the 
other was the study, off which was Napoleon 's bedroom, with 
a bathroom behind it. 

The little bedroom became the exile's sanctuary. There he 
set up his camp bed and there he placed his portraits and 
sculptures of the King of Rome and Marie Louise. The most 
intimate and pathetic touch was lent by the presence on the 
mantel of a tiny slipper that belonged to the little King. As 
a reminder of the days of conquest, there hung by the chim- 
ney a silver watch of Frederick the Great, taken from Pots- 
dam. 

No strain had been imposed on the British treasury for the 
decorations and furnishings. The walls, stained by their 
former base uses, were covered with brown nankeen. Muslin 



ST. HELENA 461 

curtains hung at the windows, and the chairs, tables and sofas 
are said to have been such as could be picked up on the island 
at second-hand. 

The landscape was nearly as bare as the house. In one 
direction lay the sea; but the prospect was made somewhat 
disagreeable by the high trade winds which blew in from the 
southeast almost continually. In all other directions, the scant 
verdure and small twisted trees of the valleys wearied, or the 
huge, bare mountains repelled the eye. And the only neigh- 
bours in sight were the red coats of the 53d regiment of the 
British army in their encampment a few hundred yards away, 
just beyond a ravine. 

Nor could the captive find solace in the bosom of his house- 
hold, for that was really more uncongenial than Longwood 
and St. Helena. If the Tory ministers, when they were 
choosing his prison isle and his prison house, had chosen his 
companions, they could hardly have found a group of per- 
sons better calculated to torment him than the selection made 
by fate. He himself had scarcely more volition in the matter 
than he had in the designation of his place of exile. He had 
to take such as offered to accompany him, for even he could 
not command men to follow him into a tomb. 

Three were men with families, and two had dragged their 
unwilling wives and their , children with them into their vol- 
untary captivity. Mme. Bertrand went with her three chil- 
dren only after vainly striving to swerve her husband from 
his purpose and after failing to drown herself by jumping 
overboard into Plymouth harbour. The Countess de Mon- 
tholon, who was accompanied by one child, had still less rea- 
son for sharing her husband's devotion to the unfortunate 
Emperor, he having forbidden from the throne her mar- 
riage to Montholon because she chanced to have two husbands 
living. Count de Las Cases took his son with him, but he 
left behind him a wife who seems, in the Count's language, 
to have been unable to "conceive either the merit or the charm 
of heroic resolutions and sacrifices." The fourth member of 
the suite, Dr. Barry O'Meara, was the strangest of all the 
followers, for that Irish surgeon in the British navy never 



462 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

had seen Napoleon until the prisoner came aboard the Belle- 
rophon. 

It will be seen that the captive was by no means condemned 
to solitary imprisonment. On the contrary, the British gov- 
ernment permitted him to surround himself with an imperial 
establishment. "When the staff at Longwood was fully organ- 
ised it comprised no fewer than forty-one persons. 

Yet Napoleon found himself frightfully lonely in the midst 
of that great crowd of retainers. He had been doomed from 
birth, however, to a life-long loneliness and never was lone- 
lier at St. Helena than when he was on the throne. "The 
Emperor is what he is, my dear Gourgaud," General Ber- 
trand sighed. "It is because of his character that he has no 
friends, that he has so many enemies and, indeed, that he is 
here in St. Helena." 

His imperious nature brought him courtiers but denied 
him friends. He persisted in holding aloof even on a rock 
in the midst of the ocean, and in the cow shed of Longwood 
he persisted in maintaining a mockery of court ceremonials, 
under the direction of a grand marshal of the palace. All 
his suite were required to array themselves as if for attend- 
ance upon him at the Tuileries. Even his physician in his 
last illness had to put on court dress before entering the 
chamber of death. Every head must be uncovered before 
him, and all his courtiers were commanded to remain stand- 
ing in his presence, hour after hour, Gourgaud having to 
lean against the door to keep from falling, and Bertrand and 
Montholon nearly fainting under the strain. 

The imprisoned Emperor was no less exacting in the tasks 
he set his followers than when he could reward his servitors 
with great titles and rich estates. His pent-up energies burst 
forth in a torrent of letters and memoirs. For fourteen 
hours, Montholon wrote and wrote at his dictation until 
utterly exhausted, and Las Cases read and wrote for him 
until his overtaxed eyes failed. 

He took long English lessons from the Count, but while he 
learned how to read the extremely unpleasant things the 
London papers were saying about him, he did not acquire the 



ST. HELENA 463 

difficult strategy of English grammar, as one may see from 
the only English composition by him which has survived: 

" Count Lascases — Since sixt week y learn the English and 
y do not any progress. Sixt week do fourty and two days. 
It might have learn fivty words, for day, i could know it two 
tousands and two hundred. It is the dictionary more of 
fourty thousand ; even he could most twenty ; hot much of 
tems. For know it or hundred and twenty week, which do 
more two years. After this you shall agree that the study 
one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young 
aged. 

' ' Longwood, this morning, the seven march thursday one 
thousand eight hundred sixteen after nativity the yors Jesus 
Christ. 

"Count Lascases, Chamellan of the S. M. Longwood; into 
his palac; very press." 

Even as in his barrack days, so at St. Helena, Napoleon 
made friends only with books, which always lay thickly 
strewn about him. Sometimes he sat up all night with them. 
At other times he lay on his couch and read for hours with- 
out interruption. 

In the beginning he prided himself on the fortitude with 
which he bore his exile. He seemed indeed disposed to make 
the best of his lot. He commended the very simple prepara- 
tions Admiral Cockburn had made for his comfort at Long- 
wood and as he had captivated Admiral Ussher, who took him 
to Elba, and Captain Maitland, who took him to England, he 
won over the British officials at St. Helena in his first half 
year there. The many dignitaries of Great Britain, round- 
ing the Cape in their voyages to or from India and the east, 
paid court to him at Longwood as eagerly as if he were still 
at the Tuileries and felt highly honoured to dine at his table. 

No doubt he was then cherishing some pleasing illusions 
about his future, hoping that a new ministry in London might 
relent and permit him to live in England, or even that the 
allied sovereigns might find it necessary to recall him in order 



464 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

to still the rising waves of another great revolution. But it 
was his misfortune to have remained a live and exciting politi- 
cal issue throughout Europe. Thus he continued to arouse 
the fear and hate of his enemies when otherwise he might have 
excited their compassion and appealed to their magnanimity. 

Although he was utterly overthrown and marooned in the 
ocean, the crowned heads could not lie easy on their pillows 
while party factions at home championed his cause. In 
England, Lord Holland and some of the foremost men in the 
opposition party were his stout defenders. But the more his 
case was agitated the more rigorous his treatment became. 

While St. Helena was not a paradise without a serpent be- 
fore the advent of its new governor, it quickly took on an 
unhappy resemblance to a penal colony after the arrival of 
Sir Hudson Lowe, in April, 1816. For reasons of their own, 
the Tory ministers had singled out this honest but narrow 
person to be Napoleon's custodian and given him a salary of 
$60,000 a year. Coming directly from those who chose him, 
presumably Sir Hudson brought specific instructions to 
tighten and shorten the chains of the imperial prisoner. 

Napoleon's instincts were aroused against the governor 
the moment he glanced at his unprepossessing countenance 
and looked into an eye that seemed to him "like the eye of 
a hyena caught in a trap." As their interviews grew 
stormier, Napoleon grew more and more averse to exposing 
himself to those provocative encounters, and after their sixth 
meeting, in August, he announced that he would never in 
the future receive the governor. And he kept his vow. Al- 
though the two men continued to dwell on the same little 
speck in the sea for nearly five years more, no word ever 
passed between them again. 

Thenceforth Lowe enforced without gloves the increasingly 
harsh orders from London. That the fallen Emperor might 
hold his court no longer and freely practise his magnetic art 
upon the too susceptible British voyagers, no one was per- 
mitted to visit Longwood without the governor's permission. 
That the prisoner might not seduce with his wiles the inhabit- 
ants of the island and by their aid overthrow the British 



ST. HELENA 465 

naval fleet and army garrison, he was forbidden to enter any 
house or speak to any one on the road except in the presence 
of a British guard. At the same time the white residents 
were warned that if one among them should speak or write 
to any person in the Longwood colony he would be deported, 
and any black person so offending was threatened with 100 
lashes on his back. All letters to or from Longwood must 
pass through the governor's hands and be read by him. 

The British ministry and the governor were constantly 
pursued by the fear that Napoleon would escape his double 
prison walls, formed by the sea and the mountains. It is 
true he could have made his way from Longwood only by a 
causeway twenty feet wide across a deep ravine, where half 
a dozen sentries could stop him, and he could have left the 
island itself only by embarking at some one of the three or 
four natural harbours on the precipitous coast, where gun- 
boats always were on guard. 

Nevertheless Lowe lined those little harbours with land 
batteries and drew around Longwood a wall of bayonets and 
howitzers. At sunset the guards closed in upon the door- 
yard, and through the night, sentinels stood about the house 
itself. On the heights overlooking the country, watchmen 
were posted with a code of signals that enabled the governor 
to know of every move Napoleon made from the moment he 
stepped out of his door. 

Yet no evidence has been found that he had any thought of 
attempting to escape or gave a word of encouragement to the 
several fantastic plans for liberating him, which were mostly 
hatched in the United States and which kept the British in a 
continual state of alarm. In the first place, he never, even 
while he lingered in France, fancied the idea of going to the 
United States. America was too far from Europe in those 
days to favour his sudden reappearance on the scene, such as 
he made from Elba, and probably it seemed too soundly demo- 
cratic to appeal to his imperial ambitions. And no doubt his 
ego shrank with terror from the prospect of sinking into the 
condition of a free but undistinguished inhabitant of the re- 
public. 



466 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

It is certain that he would rather be the first prisoner in 
the world if he could no longer be the first sovereign. As he 
lost hope of clemency, he took on the hope of becoming a mar- 
tyr in the eyes of Europe and of posterity, and he made the 
most of the liberal opportunity the British ministers gave 
him to appear in the light of a persecuted man. Thenceforth 
it was a duel between him and his jailor. "My martyrdom," 
he really rejoiced, "will do more than all else to restore the 
crown to my son." And it is within the pale of possibility 
that the uninspired Tories who inspired Sir Hudson Lowe 
were the creators of the Second Empire. 

As a protest against the restrictions and espionage pre- 
scribed for him, Napoleon shut himself up in Longwood. 
For four years he did not mount a horse. As his health 
began to fail, he stayed indoors for long periods, when he 
could not be seen by his British guards. He not only de- 
clined to see Lowe, but when the commissioners of France, 
Austria and Russia came to take up their residence at St. 
Helena, for the purpose of keeping their governments in- 
formed, he also refused to exhibit himself to them. Count 
Balmain of Russia thought indeed that he caught a long-dis- 
tance glimpse of him one lucky day, and Baron Sturmer of 
Austria and Count Montchenu of France were sure that on 
another fortunate occasion, as they were hiding in a ditch, 
they saw through their telescopes a small man in a three- 
cornered hat. The poor commissioners never were able to 
get a close view of him to reward them for their years of exile 
on the island. 

The great powers being thus baffled and mocked, Pozzo di 
Borgo found an opportunity to thrust his stiletto once more 
into his old Corsican foe. Pozzo urged the outwitted govern- 
ments to insist that Napoleon should be compelled to show 
himself to his keepers twice a day, and Europe took up the 
demand and thundered it. 

Nevertheless, the lone prisoner of Longwood, standing at 
bay in his hut, defied the nations. He was ailing and keep- 
ing to his room at the time, and he sent out the warning to 
Lowe that rather than submit to this new ignominy he would 



ST. HELENA 467 

die at the threshold of his chamber. Nor did he ever yield the 
point, and a British army captain was charged with the duty 
of peeping in at him through the windows. Notwithstand- 
ing he peeped day after day, some days keeping his eyes glued 
to the panes for twelve hours, the captain could not be posi- 
tive that the naked figure he saw coming from the tub was 
Napoleon's or that the hand he saw stropping a razor another 
time was the veritable hand that once ruled Europe. More- 
over, there were weeks when the peeper could not even offer 
a surmise as to the presence of the prisoner, and Montholon 
taunted Lowe with not knowing positively for two months 
that Napoleon still was at Longwood. 

When his health improved, the recluse emerged from his 
retirement in the winter or tropical summer of 1819-20 and, 
with a spasm of his old energy, took to gardening. Appear- 
ing at sunrise every morning and ringing a big bell, he sum- 
moned the entire household to the new task, in which they 
were aided by a gang of Chinese labourers. Under a broad- 
rimmed straw hat and in his dressing gown, he commanded 
the workmen with his walking stick, and sometimes himself 
took in hand a spade or a watering pot. Fortifications were 
thrown up to defend the garden plot from the fierce winds 
of the sea and cisterns dug to catch the rains. An orchard 
was set out and an avenue of willows projected. He also 
indulged again in a little horseback exercise. 

Devoid alike of a sense of humour and a sense of propor- 
tion, the governor and his restless taskmasters at London in- 
sisted no more sternly on keeping Napoleon from returning 
to his throne than that he should not be the titular Emperor 
even of the cow shed of Longwood. The prisoner offered to 
adopt the name of Colonel Muiron or Baron Duroc, but the 
London government seemed to think it was the prerogative 
only of royalty to wear an incognito. 

A book inscribed to him by the imperial title was confis- 
cated and some chessmen, which were sent to him as a gift, 
were threatened with the same fate for a time because an N 
and a crown were carved on them. Even some green and 
white beans, which Montholon gave to the French commis- 



468 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

sioner, fell under Lowe's suspicion and he gravely debated 
in two letters to his superiors in London whether they were 
not a dangerous allusion to the colours of the Bonapartes 
and the Bourbons. 

The government surely was not without some justification 
in objecting to the yearly expenses of Longwood out-running 
the liberal limit of $50,000 a year. When, however, a mem- 
ber of the suite reported that a resident had expressed his 
envy of the exiles, who had beef every day while the poor 
islanders could indulge their appetite for it only three or 
four times a year, Napoleon laughingly replied, "You ought 
to have told him that it cost us several crowns!" Upon 
Lowe insisting that the excess above the $50,000 allowance 
should be met out of Napoleon's own purse, the prisoner broke 
up his silver plate and sent hundreds of pounds of the frag- 
ments in baskets to be sold at Jamestown. 

The governor went more directly at what was perhaps the 
real object of his superiors in this agitation when he began 
to arrest and deport the members of the Longwood house- 
hold. First he arrested Las Cases on the charge of having 
attempted to smuggle a letter out of the island and the Count 
was deported. Finally he took away the prisoner's physi- 
cian, Dr. O'Meara, whose habit of double dealing gave the 
governor the desired pretext. O'Meara's successor, Dr. 
Stokoe, another surgeon in the British navy, quickly fell un- 
der Napoleon's spell and, arousing the governor's suspicion, 
he was court-martialed and dismissed from the navy after 
nearly twenty years' service. One of the charges preferred 
against the doctor was that he had refused to employ the 
words "General Bonaparte" in his reports from the sick 
room, for now Napoleon was a painfully sick man, and had 
designated him simply as "the patient." 

Meanwhile General Gourgaud, after vainly trying to get up 
a duel with Montholon, voluntarily sailed away to Europe, 
but with a secret communication from Napoleon in the soles 
of his boots. The Countess de Montholon also returned home. 

Before three years of the exile had passed, a full half of the 
little Longwood colony had succumbed to homesickness and 




The Last Days of Napoleon, by Vela 




The Camp Bed ox Which He Died 
(Now cherished at Malmaison ) 



ST. HELENA 469 

gone away. The prisoner fancied that in the end no one but 
Marchand would remain and he said to his valet: "You will 
read to me and you will close my eyes. ' ' 

So it might have been had he lived a little longer. For 
Montholon keenly felt the absence of his wife, and he and 
the Bertrands, too, were appealing for substitutes to relieve 
them when happily death came to the relief of the exile him- 
self. 

In much of the latter half of his more than five years of 
exile, Napoleon was in the painful throes of cancer, although 
his disease was not discovered by his physicians. The bitter- 
ness of the duel that never ceased to rage between him and 
London cut him off from the sympathy and consideration of 
the British government, and even to the last it was supposed 
that he was only shamming. A political motive was sus- 
pected in his every action. When complaint was heard of 
a swarm of rats that invaded Longwood, running about the 
Emperor's feet, jumping out of his hat when he picked it 
up, attacking other members of the party and racing and 
squealing all night, the colonial secretary in London hon- 
estly persuaded himself that Napoleon must be encouraging 
and marshalling the rodents in order to give him another 
grievance. 

Among all his brother sovereigns the only one to speak a 
word of pity was he who had the most to forgive. With 
Christian charity, Pius VII listened to the prayers of the 
afflicted mother of the prisoner and appealed to the prince 
regent of England and the allied monarchs for the alleviation 
of the banished Emperor's hard lot. 

The British government consented to permit a friendly 
physician and two priests to go to St. Helena, and Cardinal 
Fesch chose three Corsicans, Dr. Antommarchi and Fathers 
Vignali and Buonavita. While Father Vignali heard his 
confession and at the last gave him the sacraments of the 
church, the newcomers did not prove to be agreeable com- 
panions for Napoleon. He remained indifferent to the simple 
priests and could not give his confidence or his respect to the 
doctor. 



470 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Doctors O'Meara and Stokoe had diagnosed his ailment as 
a disease of the liver and he regarded himself as a victim of 
the St. Helena climate. Antommarchi, however, did not view 
the symptoms with much gravity. In the levity of his char- 
acter, this new doctor actually mocked the frightful suffer- 
ings of his patient, which he fancied were only stimulated in 
the hope of gaining the sympathy of the world and a return 
to Europe. When Napoleon told him of the stabbing pains 
in his side, where cancerous ulcers were cutting their way 
unsuspected by the five physicians who first and last had 
attended him, Antommarchi only laughed at him and gave 
him a drastic purge of tartar emetic that caused the sick man 
to writhe on the floor. 

Even in the month before the end, when Napoleon reclined 
in his chair, stricken and cold, his memory gone and his mind 
wandering, an English doctor doubted the seriousness of his 
condition and told him to get up and shave, his beard being 
long and giving his face an uncanny appearance. The dying 
man could only feebly plead his helplessness. 

Lord Bathurst, the colonial secretary in London, was seized 
most inopportunely with a new alarm and warned Lowe that 
he had strong reasons for believing that "General Bonaparte" 
was seriously cherishing an idea of escaping from St. Helena. 
It was true. The prisoner of Longwood well knew that the 
hour of his deliverance was fast approaching. "England 
calls for my corpse," he said three weeks before his spirit sur- 
rendered it; "I will not keep her waiting." 

In the sixth year of his captivity, he limped into the draw- 
ing room to pass his few remaining days. There, while Mon- 
tholon watch&d by him at night, he heard him murmur in his 
delirium, "France tete d'Armee!" — head of the army — and 
saw him suddenly spring up from his cot, the cot on which 
he had slept at Austerlitz — and at Waterloo. The Count laid 
a restraining hand on him, but with a fitful burst of that en- 
ergy which had shaken thrones, the delirious man seized him 
and dragged him to the floor. It was Napoleon's last struggle, 
and thenceforth throughout the day, he lay motionless on his 
little camp bed, thirty inches wide. 



ST. HELENA 471 

It was May 5, 1821. 

About the dying Emperor, stood his grand marshal and 
Mme. Bertrand, with their children; Count de Montholon, 
Marchand and St. Denis, with others of the servants. In the 
next room, Father Vignali knelt at the altar. 

The sun was setting behind black clouds which had rolled in 
from the wind-swept Atlantic and burst upon St. Helena. 
The furious storm like the roar of mighty batteries, terrified 
the islanders, who were almost unacquainted with the sound of 
thunder. The tents of the British Guards at Longwood were 
blown away and the cordon of picket ships made for the 
open sea. 

At eleven minutes before six, when the tempest was beating 
loudest against the walls of Longwood, the exile made his 
final escape. As the tormented soul took flight, the calmness 
and beauty of youth overspread the classic countenance on 
the pillow, leaving no trace of the restless ambitions and tur- 
bulent passions that so long had troubled it. 

Napoleon himself had framed the letter of notification which 
was despatched to the governor. An autopsy was held by 
the physicians who had failed to diagnose the fatal disease. 
They found that the liver was only slightly enlarged but that 
the stomach was terribly ravaged by a cancerous growth. 
The heart, which proved to be remarkably small, was removed 
in accordance with the request of Napoleon, who directed that 
it should be delivered to Marie Louise. The governor, how- 
ever, refused to let it be carried from the island until it had 
been duly released by the British government. 

A grave was dug in a spot chosen by the Emperor beside 
a spring and beneath the shade of two willows in a deep 
ravine, then called the Devil's Punchbowl, but thenceforth 
more agreeably known as Geranium Valley. Some slabs of 
stone, torn from the kitchen floor at Longwood, were selected 
for the covering of the tomb, and the mourning followers 
wished to carve upon it merely the name, Napoleon. The 
governor, however forbade the inscription as too imperial, un- 
less the surname Bonaparte were added, and the stone was 
left bare. 



472 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

The sword of the conqueror and the cloak he wore at Ma- 
rengo were laid on the coffin, which, on the fourth day after 
death, was borne from Long-wood in a rude funeral car, and 
as the Great Captain was laid to rest in the melancholy vale, 
British guns volleyed across his nameless grave. 



CHAPTER LII 
L'AIGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 

AFTER marching through blood and fire from Cadiz to 
Moscow, in his ambition to found a Bonaparte dynasty, 
Napoleon bequeathed to his race only a crown of sor- 
row and a heritage of misfortune. While he lingered in 
captivity within the gigantic walls of St. Helena, his son was 
not less a prisoner in his grandfather's palace at Vienna, and 
his brothers and sisters, whom he had thrust into the sacred 
circle of royalty, were branded as outcasts by the old reign- 
ing families of Europe, who condemned them to wander over 
the earth with their trunks for their thrones. 

If those parvenu princes and princesses were despised by 
the triumphant sovereigns, the four-year-old King of Rome 
inspired a dread in every palace and cabinet of Europe. For 
he was the eagle's own fledgling and half a Hapsburg besides. 
Wherefore the little eagle languished a captive in his gilded 
cage. 

In imitation of Napoleon, the allied monarchs determined 
to make themselves the masters of Europe. He had attempted 
to unite the nations in a great federation, under his sole rule, 
and they determined to revive the federation under their 
joint rule. To that end, they formed the celebrated Holy Alli- 
ance, which was inaugurated by Czar Alexander I and which 
was joined by virtually all the sovereigns on the continent. 
With the establishment of that league, the kings thought 
they had secured for all time the reign of peace under their 
authority. 

Only the fear that the French volcano might again burst 
forth troubled the counsels of the Allies. They were sure 
there was no danger as long as Louis XVIII lolled on the 
throne; but they well knew that the King could be ejected 

473 



474 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

from the Tuileries as readily now as when Napoleon returned 
from Elba. At the thought that the exiled Emperor might 
even scale the walls of St. Helena and swim across the ocean, 
they furiously demanded in their meeting at Aix la Cha- 
pelle in 1818 that he should show himself to his custodians 
twice a day. 

Even when the welcome news came that the prisoner of 
Longwood lay in the nameless grave beneath the willows, they 
still could not rest at ease. For there was another Napoleon 
at Vienna, and all the while they had been hardly less fearful 
and watchful of him. Their suspicion and alarm obliged his 
grandfather to immure the boy within his palace walls and 
his timid mother was frightened into abandoning him. 

A faint and pathetic shadow on the pages of history is poor 
l'Aiglon, the pale shade of his mighty sire. That he might 
be born, an Empress was dethroned and the proudest imperial 
race in the world gave its daughter to a Corsican plebeian, 
whereat Emperors quarrelled, Russia was invaded, Moscow 
burned, and the Cossacks raced across Europe and broke down 
the gates of Paris. His first wail was heard round the earth; 
kings kneeling by his crib of gold acclaimed him the inheritor 
of the loftiest throne and the widest domain of modern times, 
and the crown of Rome was placed upon his infant brow. 

Now, while yet in his lisping childhood, his crown and his 
inheritance were gone, his father was taken from him and 
he was all but deserted by his mother. Snatched from his 
home, he was deprived of his French courtiers and servants 
and carried into a foreign country. There he was not per- 
mitted to see a familiar face but was surrounded by strangers 
who spoke a strange language, under orders to wean him 
from his mother tongue. 

Living in his grandfather's palace at Schonbrunn at the 
edge of Vienna, he seems to have had no playmates for fear 
they would, with boyish frankness, remind him of the destiny 
to which he had been dedicated in his cradle. Even his little 
toys were put away lest they keep alive a recollection of his 
nursery in the Tuileries. 

His very name was denied and he was no longer Napoleon 



L'AIGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 475 

Francis Charles, but Joseph Carl Franz, being addressed as 
Franz in the family circle of the Hapsburgs. The proud 
title of Roi de Rome was likewise changed to Herzog von 
Reichstadt. In the official patent creating his Austrian duke- 
dom, his paternity was ignored as if he were the unlawful 
child of Marie Louise by an unknown father. And, after the 
manner of illegitimate children of princes and princesses, he 
did not rank as a member of the imperial family. 

Even all that remorseless obliteration of the identity of the 
young Napoleon did not suffice to allay the anxieties of the 
Grand Alliance. That body demanded that he must be cut 
off from the succession to his mother's little duchy of Parma 
and not be permitted even to live with her, where his pres- 
ence might enlist the sympathy and support of Marie Louise's 
subjects. The Allies insisted that there must be no possi- 
bility left for the son of Napoleon to inherit the smallest 
sovereignty anywhere. 

Nor was that enough. When the Emperor Francis of Aus- 
tria announced that he would make his grandson the Duke 
of Reichstadt and confer certain estates on him and his heirs, 
that mere suggestion of posterity inspired the Grand Alliance 
with a new terror. Pozzo di Borgo took the lead among those 
who demanded that the Napoleonic race should be exter- 
minated. The Duke must be thrust into the church under a 
vow of celibacy, or at least be forbidden ever to marry. 

The grandfather, however, did not yield to that extreme 
demand. But when he issued the ducal patent he omitted 
all disturbing references to the heirs of the Duke. 

With the nations dreading and his own maternal kindred 
regretting his existence; amidst plots for his assassination, 
which were fomented by a hatred of his blood, and plots for 
his abduction, which were concocted by enthusiastic Bona- 
partists in France ; breathing an atmosphere of mystery and 
suspicion; detecting concealment in every face and awkward 
avoidances in every conversation, the little eagle grew up. 
The creature and the victim of his extraordinary environ- 
ment, he passed from shyness to taciturnity, from fear to 
deceit, and became the baffling problem of the corps of solemn 



476 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

pedagogues who were chosen to eradicate any dangerous 
atavistic traits in his nature while they moulded him into an 
Austrian and a Hapsburg. 

Notwithstanding the oblivion in which his origin was studi- 
ously wrapped, he continued for a time to talk of "when I 
used to be a king," and he persisted in the habit of including 
his father in his prayers, since no one appeared to have the 
hardihood to forbid him. When those who constantly watched 
him were gratified to find his childish thoughts of his exiled 
parent growing dim, his interest would be revived by some 
passing boy shouting, "Look at the little Napoleon!" 

The child knew that his father had been the Emperor of 
the French, but with a secret shame he suspected that he had 
been "sent away" as a criminal for something he had done. 
It was not until he was nearly seven that he made bold to 
question one of his teachers directly, and this pathetic dia- 
logue took place: "My father is in the East Indies, I think?" 
"Ah, no, it is not so." "Perhaps he is in America?" 
4 4 Why should he be there ? " " Where is he then ? " "I can- 
not tell you." "It seems to me I have heard it said he was 
in exile?" "What? In exile?" "Yes." " How could that 
be possible?" 

Thus put off, the little Duke retired within himself again, 
but only to emerge in a few days with the comment, "Napo- 
leon must have been a famous general!" And he added the 
question, "Why is he no longer Emperor?" The teacher re- 
plied that all the powers had made war against him because 
he tried to usurp the whole world. Then the boy returned 
once more to the subject of his consuming curiosity with the 
remark, "I have always heard he is in Africa." 

In despair of his forgetting his father, his guardian ap- 
pealed to Emperor Francis, who commissioned Metternich, 
of all men, to have a long talk with the youth about Napo- 
leon. By an equally ironical choice, the Duke was to hear, 
when he was older, a review of his father's campaigns by 
Marmont, the first marshal to betray the Emperor. 

When the report came to Vienna that the exile of St. 
Helena had been liberated, l'Aiglon was a handsome boy of 



L'AIGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 477 

ten, and had now fully succeeded in penetrating the mystery 
which had enveloped his paternity. The teacher who broke 
to the Duke the news of Napoleon's death was surprised that 
he should shed so many tears for a father whom he had not 
seen since as a child of three the Emperor took him in his 
arms and kissed him good-bye, before departing on the dis- 
astrous French campaign of 1814. But Metternich advised 
the father-in-law that it would not do to permit mourning 
for one who had been civilly dead six years. 

Marie Louise did not pay to the dead exile the tribute of a 
widow's tears when the Emperor Francis notified his daugh- 
ter that ''General Bonaparte" was no more. The reply of 
the ex-Empress who now reigned at Parma as the sovereign 
of a little Italian duchy, is a strange document: 

I confess I was extremely shocked. Although I never had any 
deep feeling for him, I cannot forget that he is the father of my 
son, and that far from treating me badly, as the world seems to 
think, he always showed me the greatest consideration, which, after 
all, is all that one should expect from a political marriage. I was, 
therefore, very much grieved, and although there is reason to be 
glad that he ended his unhappy life as a Christian should, I would 
have wished him many more years of happiness and life — provided 
they were lived apart from me. 

That concluding sentiment may sound unnecessarily harsh, 
but it was the very truth. It would have been most annoy- 
ing had Napoleon returned to live again with his wife, for in 
anticipation of widowhood she had given her left hand to 
Count Neipperg and taken a second husband the year before. 
Never in his tortuous career did Metternich make a shrewder 
choice of an agent than when, at Napoleon's -first downfall, he 
commissioned the Count to alienate the thoughts of Marie 
Louise from her husband. 

When Dr. Antommarchi appeared at Parma she declined 
to see that messenger from St. Helena and asked him to give 
her first husband's dying message to the second husband. 
The exile had wished to send her a still more substantial token 
of his affection and had requested Antommarchi to "place 



478 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

my heart in spirits of wine and take it to my beloved Marie 
Louise." Fortunately for her, Sir Hudson Lowe had vigi- 
lantly prevented the escape of that organ, but Dr. Antom- 
marchi wished her to demand it from the Holy Alliance. 
She was naturally quite upset by this awkward situation. 
She implored her father to see that the heart was left in St. 
Helena, because if it should be brought to Parma it would 
give her a "fresh shock" and besides attract crowds of pil- 
grims. 

For two years at a time l'Aiglon did not look upon his 
mother, and she became to him a stranger whom he met and 
parted from without emotion. His childhood and boyhood 
were passed almost wholly among men, charged to take every 
care that he should not moult into a full-fledged eagle. 

"While he silently peered out upon a world that had seemed 
to ban him, musing in the paths of Schonbrunn, or reflect- 
ing alone in his little log house in the palace park, the Bona- 
partists rallied around his name and sedulously kept alive his 
memory in France. When it was suspected that Gourgaud 
was coming on a mission to the young Napoleon, Metternich 
ordered that he should be turned back from the frontier. 
Again, a French emissary tried to open communication with 
him by tossing into his passing carriage a letter which an- 
nounced, "Sire! 30,000,000 subjects await your return." 
But the boy's watchful custodian grabbed the letter so quickly 
that he thought the Prince had not even noticed the incident. 

Poets smote their lyres to "The Son of the Man," and, 
although the Bourbon police raided the Paris shops time and 
again, perfumery bottles, drinking glasses, snuff boxes, knives, 
handkerchiefs, pipes and all manner of personal articles bear- 
ing l'Aiglon 's portrait found their way into French pockets 
and French homes. Even in Vienna, Metternich was dis- 
turbed by the appearance of gloves, on which the boy's like- 
ness had been stamped, and the police seized them. While 
one faction thus was trying to thrust a crown upon the Duke, 
another faction was supposed to be planning his assassination, 
and Savary sent a warning to Metternich that Pozzo di Borgo 
was a member of a conspiracy to murder the heir of Napoleon. 



L'AIGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 479 

When the French national spirit had sufficiently revived 
to throw off the Bourbons, and the nation was on the eve of 
the Revolution of 1830, the Bonapartists besought the Aus- 
trian government to free the captive eaglet and let him fly 
to the waiting throne. Many dispassionate observers were 
convinced that l'Aiglon needed only to appear in France to 
receive the crown ; but the Hapsburgs dared not consult their 
own family interests and gain the French throne. Thus in 
spite of all the dreams and schemes of the Bonapartists, not 
l'Aiglon but Louis Philippe of the House of Orleans profited 
by the Revolution and became the Citizen King of the French. 

At that time the Duke was preparing to enter upon a mili- 
tary career under the Austrian flag. As he impatiently ap- 
proached the end of his tutelage, his teachers sounded many 
alarms and apparently were extremely apprehensive about 
his future. His chief tutor described his character as weak 
and his education imperfect, speaking of his "want of bal- 
ance," his "unbridled passions and obstinacy," and his 
"crude and distorted ideas." The pedagogue did not how- 
ever, make all the entries on the debtor side of the Duke's 
ledger. On the contrary, he conceded his "engaging appear- 
ance," his "fascinating and often impressive observations" 
and "all that stamps him as belonging to a special order." 

The Duke himself once or twice dropped his reticence con- 
cerning his inner thoughts and left us a fleeting view of the 
ambition that glimmered within his prisoned body. When he 
was sixteen he received a letter from Count Neipperg urging 
him more diligently to study the French language, which he 
had all but lost. The Duke replied approvingly to the Count, 
whom he probably never suspected of being his stepfather: 
"It (French) is the language in which my father gave the 
word of command in all his battles, in which his name was 
covered with glory and in which he has left us unparalleled 
memoirs of the art of war, while to the last he expressed the 
wish that I should never repudiate the nation into which I 
was born." 

Again he vowed, "The chief aim of my life must be not to 
remain unworthy of my father's fame." On another occa- 



480 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

sion he said to a man in tones of deepest gratitude, "You 
defended my father 's honour at a time when all men vied with 
one another to slander his name. I have read your 'Battle 
of Waterloo,' and in order to impress its every line on my 
memory I translated it twice — into French and Italian." 

At twenty the Duke was removed from the custody of his 
teachers, but only to be placed under the surveillance of a 
group of army officers. Yet the Hapsburgs pretended to be- 
lieve that amid all those fetters they were really rearing an 
eagle, another Napoleon who, at the head of the Austrian 
army, would prove himself the first soldier in the world. His 
sour old preceptor-in-chief was sure that his pupil could be 
made "the worthy heir of his father's fame," and "a pow- 
erful upholder of the Austrian state." On every hand un- 
bounded hopes were professed of the soaring heights which 
he would achieve. Yet the Emperor and Metternich dared 
not let him go to Prague or leave Vienna for fear the little 
eagle might homeward fly ! 

At court balls his appearance aroused curiosity such as no 
Hapsburg excited. His beautiful face and ready wit con- 
quered men and women alike. As he went to his barracks, 
the Viennese stood at their windows to see the tall, distin- 
guished, and nobly seated horseman gallop by. The soldiers 
broke the decorum of the drill ground to greet him with ring- 
ing cheers whenever he presented himself before them. 

The young officer displayed so much zeal and generally such 
a fiery temperament in his military duties that he neglected 
to rest and slighted his meals. His physician counselled pru- 
dence and warned him that he had a spirit of iron in a body 
of crystal. For the youth had grown too fast and he had the 
too narrow chest of the Hapsburg race. 

After an ailing time in bed, when his physicians failed to 
detect his tubercular symptoms, he went driving on the 
Prater. It was a raw cold day in the spring of 1832 and, his 
carriage breaking down, he started to walk home but sank 
fainting in the street. When he returned to his sick bed he 
quickly fell a prey to tuberculosis. 

Week after week he strove for life with rapidly increasing 



L'AIGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 481 

feebleness. Still his mother, presumably absorbed in her new 
family at Parma, did not come to see him. Afterward when 
she did visit Austria, she tarried with her father at Trieste 
and long deferred the remaining short journey to Vienna. 

When Metternich visited the Duke and saw what a "terrible 
wreck" he was, he wrote to the Emperor insisting that Marie 
Louise must hasten to the side of her son. Only then did she 
awaken to her maternal duty, so much had she grown apart 
from her old life and from her boy. 

The last night came, when the soul of l'Aiglon beat against 
the wasted and broken bars of its bodily cage. He lay in the 
great frescoed room where, after the victory of Wagram, his 
father had dictated terms of peace to his grandfather and had 
dreamed of demanding a daughter of the Caesars to give him 
an heir to his empire and his glory. Marie Louise slept, and 
only a valet, not even a doctor, watched and heard the de- 
lirious murmurings of the dying youth. 

"Call my mother! Call my mother!" he hoarsely whis- 
pered as the dawning summer day lit up the big, empty room, 
and he felt himself sinking with no hand but a valet's to 
grasp. It was not thus that he had come into the world. 
Then the dignitaries of an empire crowded about the bed; 
Paris anxiously listened for the 100 guns of the Invalides and 
all Europe hearkened to his birth cry. Now he was sighing 
away his poor, fruitless life in a deserted chamber. 

The valet called a member of the Duke's staff and a physi- 
cian. They, however, hesitated to break in upon Marie 
Louise's sleep and the mother was not summoned until her 
boy 's lips were silent and his eyes fixed. Kneeling by his bed- 
side at the administration of the sacrament of extreme unc- 
tion, she rose only when told that l'Aiglon had taken flight 
and was free at last. 

She had hardly more than gone when the palace crowd 
began to stream into the chamber and seize upon souvenirs 
of the dead. In an hour they had almost stripped his room, 
carrying off his sticks and whips and ruthlessly snipping his 
yellow curls until his head was shorn of most of its hair. 

When death thus claimed the son of Marie Louise it brought 



482 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

a strange revenge to the memory of the divorced Josephine. 
For now her grandson, Louis Napoleon, the only surviving 
son of Hortense, became the heir to the overturned throne of 
the Empire and the hope of the proscribed and scattered 
Bonapartes. 

At the fall of Napoleon, Mme. Mere in her refuge at Rome 
had become the real head of the family. In prosperity 
her children had smiled at the prudent counsels of this 
simple, thrifty woman who in poverty, had reared them by 
patching and scrubbing. When adversity came once more 
they turned to her again and placed themselves under her 
stern maternal rule. She had saved more than any of them 
from a disaster which she had always foretold, and they no 
longer were ashamed of her parsimony. 

To Napoleon she offered all she had, because she said she 
owed it all to him. "What does it matter?" she argued. 
"When I shall have nothing left, I shall take my stick and 
go about begging alms for Napoleon's mother." 

Mme. Mere was seventy-one when called to mourn the 
death of the Emperor. It was her sorrowful fortune to 
survive many who were dear to her. Her daughter Elisa, 
the former Grand Duchess of Tuscany, died the year before, 
and her daughter Pauline, the Princess Borghese, four years 
after Napoleon. Death next claimed l'Aiglon, her heir, the 
rose and expectancy of her old age. Then Saveria, the long- 
time companion who in plainer days had shared the house- 
hold labours at Ajaccio, was taken from her. 

As unbending before the frowns as she had been before the 
smiles of fortune, sustained by her maternal pride in having 
given to the world a master, Mme. Mere remained an active 
and familiar figure in the streets and parks and churches of 
Rome until, at 80, she tripped and broke her hip. For six 
years more she tarried, a cripple in a world of graves. Ly- 
ing at full length on a mattress in her carriage, she persisted 
for a time in driving about the noble city. At home in her 
old palazzo on the Corso, which still is marked out on the 
guide books of Rome, her favourite post was by a window, 
and Romans and travellers from all parts of the world 



L'AIGLON AND THE BONAPARTES 483 

paused in the Piazza Venezia to gaze up at the mother of 
Napoleon. Blindness was added to her afflictions, but with 
a motherly smile she turned her sightless eyes still to the bust 
of the Emperor, always by her side. 

"lam indeed a Mater Dolorosa," she sighed, as she called 
again and again the roll of her dead, until at last the hand 
of mercy wrote her own name upon it. Four sons and a 
daughter outlived this mother of kings. Caroline and Lucien, 
who are believed to have died, like Napoleon and like their 
father, of cancer of the stomach, and Joseph and Louis fol- 
lowed her in the course of ten years ; but Jerome lagged super- 
fluous, well into the Second Empire. 

Perhaps Marie Louise's closing years were no less tragic 
than her mother-in-law's, if the story of them could be read 
with the eye of sympathy rather than mocked by a sense of 
the ridiculous. Count Neipperg, dying three years before 
l'Aiglon, the widow's grief seemed inconsolable, although two 
of their three children remained to comfort her. For several 
years the Count's place at the head of the ducal government 
was filled by a temporary selection. When it became neces- 
sary for Metternich to choose a permanent successor, his 
choice fell upon Count Bombelles, whom he described as "a 
man strong enough to influence the weak character of the 
Archduchess Marie Louise." 

Again the discrimination of the great statesman was abun- 
dantly verified. For Bombelles, who had been a French emi- 
grant in revolutionary and Napoleonic days, and was now a 
widower of forty-nine, was fairly dragged to the altar by the 
enamoured Marie Louise, six months after entering her service. 
The Count was amazed by the Duchess' proposal and only 
obeyed it because it had the force of a command from his 
sovereign. 

Since it is not possible to make a romance of Marie Louise 's 
life, it were well not to dwell upon it longer. She died at 
Parma in her fifty-seventh year, having survived the first of 
her three husbands twenty-six years. 

The story of Napoleon's dynastic ambition fittingly closes 
in a melancholy dusk, which wraps with its gloom the couches 



484 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

of the ill-fated Hapsburgs. From a long, narrow, bare hall 
beside the Capuchin church in the midst of Vienna, a blue- 
eyed, blond-bearded monk in sandals leads the waiting pil- 
grim down a dark cellar stair to a drear vaulted chamber 
where Austria's imperial dead for 300 years lie in sim- 
ple bronze coffins. Many of them are scattered about the 
floor as if but pausing on their way to the grave. Only here 
and there a monument rises dimly in the twilight specially to 
mark the resting place of some emperor; but the most con- 
spicuous tomb of all is that of the woman who proved herself 
more of a man than any of her race, Maria Theresa. 

Maximilian is there among his kindred, thanks to the Aus- 
trian warship which lay by the Mexican shore, helplessly 
waiting to bear him home when he should have paid the pen- 
alty of his imperial dream at Queretaro. So, too, are the 
Empress Elizabeth, the guiltless victim of an assassin, and 
her son, the Crown Prince Rudolph, enshrouded in the tragic 
mystery of his death. 

In an elevated sarcophagus sleeps the Emperor Francis, with 
four metal coffins lying on the floor beside him. Those compan- 
ions of the Emperor are not, however, the four wives, who, in 
succession, shared his throne. At his head and feet lie two 
children, and on either side of him Marie Louise and l'Aiglon, 
the latter booted and spurred, and in his Austrian uniform. 

In death the little eagle's paternity was not disdained or 
denied. The Hapsburgs were not ashamed to confess on his 
coffin plate that the blood of Rudolph and the Corsican 
mingled in his veins, and the inscription boasts that he was 
King of Rome before he was the Duke of Reichstadt. On 
Marie Louise's plate Napoleon alone is acknowledged among 
her husbands, for no other title to remembrance had she. 

It was not there among the Hapsburgs but among the Bour- 
bons that the Emperor meant his Empress and his heir to 
find their sepulture. Yet even at St. Denis they would not 
be in prouder or more ancient company than beneath the old 
church in Vienna. And those glory-loving Frenchmen who 
would bring l'Aiglon back to place him beside his father in 
the Invalides would do better to let him alone in his captivity. 



CHAPTER LIII 

ACROSS A CENTURY 

WHILE the body of Napoleon lay in its lonely, un- 
marked grave at St. Helena his spirit conquered 
Europe anew and mounted again the throne of 
France. The peoples who had overthrown his Empire soon 
found to their sorrow that they had exchanged a brilliant for 
a stupid despotism. The more they saw of the little heredi- 
tary tyrants who supplanted him the more they lamented the 
downfall of the great tyrant. The pledges they had received 
from their monarchs in the wars of liberation were ruthlessly 
broken and something like a royalist reign of terror was in- 
augurated by the Holy Alliance. That federation, that 
United States of Europe, under the presidency of the Em- 
peror of Austria and with Metternich for its premier, really 
became a league against popular rights and progress every- 
where, and the armies of the continent were converted into 
an international police force for the suppression of liberty. 

In his will Napoleon had said, ''It is my wish that my 
ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, amid the French 
people whom I loved so well." That the body of the exile 
might be rescued from alien soil and rest by the Seine was a 
growing national desire among the French when, as a last 
resource, the Orleanist King, Louis Philippe, resolved to bring 
it back in the hope that his fading crown might borrow some 
glory from the imperial dust. And England having gra- 
ciously consented to release her captive, the King sent his 
brother, the Prince Joinville, to St. Helena to escort the Em- 
peror home. 

In the Prince's party were Generals Bertrand and Gour- 
guad ; Marchand, the valet ; St. Denis, and three others of the 
old servants at Longwood. With them also was the son of Las 

Cases, who was now to revisit in manhood the sombre scenes 

485 



486 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

of his boyhood. Still another member of the pilgrimage was 
the son of Bertrand, who was born in exile, when his mother 
boasted at his birth that she had received one visitor without 
asking permission of the British government. 

The sight of their prison house only deepened the unpleasant 
memories it had left with the one-time prisoners of St. Helena. 
They returned to Longwood as to a shrine of their hero, but 
they found that it had reverted to its original use and again 
become a stable. Horses, cows, and pigs had been turned into 
the Emperor's study and bedroom and in the death chamber 
a farmer winnowed his grain. 

The grave of Napoleon, however, still was guarded by his 
zealous captors, as if determined that even his ghost should not 
escape them. When the visitors made their pious pilgrimage 
down into Geranium Valley, they found a British soldier 
posted there on a sentry duty that never had been omitted 
night or day in the more than nineteen years that the captive 
had slept beneath the willows. 

Reverently the bare, uninscribed gravestones were removed 
and the coffin was lifted out of the brick grave. "When it was 
opened, they who had thought to see imperial Caesar dead 
and turned to clay, drew back in astonishment and awe at 
sight of the Emperor, with his Jove-like brow, lying at ease 
and lifelike, in the green coat of the chasseurs of the Guard, 
the cross of the Legion gleaming on his breast with undimned 
lustre. 

On a December day in 1840, Paris opened wide her gates to 
receive Napoleon, as if he were the still living conqueror re- 
turned from a victorious campaign. Mounted upon a stately 
funeral car and escorted by the aged veterans of the Old 
Guard, his body was borne in triumph under his Arch of the 
Star and down the Champs Elysees, across the Place de la 
Concorde and over the Seine to the Hotel des Invalides. 

Beneath the gilded dome of the Invalides, the King and the 
royal family, in full court splendour, awaited the arrival of 
the heroic dead. The hush was broken at last by a chamber- 
lain who dramatically entered and thrilled the distinguished 
assemblage with the announcement, "L'Empereur !" 



ACROSS A CENTURY 487 

Instantly monarch and princes, generals, statesmen and 
courtiers rose to their feet; but one among them feebly sank 
into his chair again beneath the weight of his nearly ninety 
years. This was Moncey, governor of the Invalides, who was 
the last marshal of the Empire to give up the defence of the 
capital when the Allies surged against its walls in 1814. 

And now when no drop of Bonaparte blood courses beneath 
a crown, the Emperor still is enthroned there under the golden 
dome of the Invalides. That vast soldiers' home has lost the 
purpose to which Louis XIV dedicated it when he opened it 
to the wrecks of his battles. It has become instead a great 
shrine of war, whose chief deity is the martial Emperor of the 
French. 

The magnificent tomb is in one of the two chapels of the 
immense pile, which is mainly given over to the exhibition 
halls of a museum, crowded with the jumbled relics of ages 
of warfare. Always the visitors to the museum throng 
thickest about some Napoleonic souvenir : the rude funeral ear 
which bore him to his St. Helena grave, a gift from Queen 
Victoria; a simple wooden settee, which was the favourite 
seat of the throneless monarch in his exile ; the walking stick 
which supported him who once had carried the weight of em- 
pire on his shoulders; the rough, frightfully rough, draft of 
his appeal to the Prince Regent before going aboard the 
Bellerophon, and other of his undecipherable scrawlings; the 
writing table upon which he poured out his dreams while a 
hungry lieutenant at Auxonne ; his camp bed, camp desk and 
camp bookcase and the whip and sword and gun of the King 
of Rome. But the grey overcoat, the green undercoat, the 
white breeches and the black chapeau of the conqueror draw 
the curious closest and hold them longest. 

In the chapel of St. Louis a silvery bell tinkles the half 
hours among the tombs in the Aisle of the Brave, where the 
soldiers of France sleep in a timeless eternity. There lie Mar- 
shals Bessieres, Moncey, Serurier, Oudinot and Jourdan. 
There also is the heart of Kleber, which the unerring knife 
of an Egyptian assassin found, and so, too, is the heart of 
that first grenadier of France, La Tour d'Auvergne. 



488 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

It is strange that of Napoleon's twenty-six marshals only- 
three, Lannes, Bessieres, and Poniatowski, should have met a 
soldier 's death and that all but eight should have died in their 
beds. Four were killed in the period of their master 's down- 
fall, Ney by the Bourbons, Murat by the Neapolitans, Brune 
by a mob and Berthier by falling from his window, while 
Mortier was struck down by a bomb thrown at King Louis 
Philippe in 1835. 

Massena, Augureau, Perignon, Kellerman and Lefebre did 
not long survive the Empire, and died before Napoleon. But 
thirteen, or precisely one-half of the marshals outlived the 
Emperor, and Grouchy, Victor, Oudinot, Marmont, Soult, 
Moncey and Bernadotte were still living when his remains 
were brought back from St. Helena. 

The Chapel of the Dome, in which Napoleon lies, was erected 
by the Grand Monarque as the Royal Church in the Invalides, 
150 years before the usurper of the Bourbon throne found 
his grave in front of its high altar. It was the Em- 
peror himself who converted it to a mortuary purpose, 
when he brought to the chapel the body of Turenne and the 
heart of Vauban, those two marshals of Louis XIV, and gave 
them sepulture there. 

The lofty wooden dome, with its now neglected and shabby 
gilding, rests like a gigantic helmet on the tomb of Napoleon, 
which sits beneath the very cupola and in an open circular 
crypt, twenty feet below the floor of the church. As if to 
armour him against invaders of his quiet realm, he lies in no 
less than six coffins of oak, mahogany, ebony, lead, and tin, 
which in turn are guarded within a massive fortress in the 
form of an imposing sarcophagus, standing nearly fifteen feet 
high. 

The rare red porphyry of the sarcophagus came from that 
Finland, which, at Tilsit, Napoleon permitted Russia to take 
from Sweden. The Czar Nicholas I cheerfully consented to 
the quarrying of it with the remark that since Russia had 
overthrown him, it was only fair that she should entomb him. 
But the son of the blue sea is shielded from those alien stones 
cut on the frozen shores of the White Sea, by a lining of the 



ACROSS A CENTURY 489 

warm-tinted granite of his own native Corsica, while the base 
of all is a block of that green granite with which nature has 
fortified the Gaul against the Teuton in the mountains of 
Vosges. 

Like sentinels about the tomb stand twelve colossal Vic- 
tories in Carrara marble. Even as the Empire made the fatal 
mistake of exalting force above justice, so Napoleon's vic- 
tories of peace are celebrated in the dim shadows behind his 
victories of war, where in bas relief on the wall of the crypt 
are carved symbolical representations of his undisputed titles 
to the gratitude of posterity — the Code Napoleon; the execu- 
tion of great public works; the founding of the University of 
France ; the establishment of the Legion of Honour ; the pro- 
tection of commerce and industry ; the regulation of the public 
finances ; the Concordat ; the creation of the council of state ; 
the reform of the civil administration and the restoration of 
public order. 

Only four personages of the Empire were specially chosen 
to be their Emperor's attendants in death. His brothers, 
Joseph and Jerome, have their tombs in chapels on either 
side of the entrance to the church, while downstairs on either 
side of the bronze doors of the crypt the bodies of two of his 
most devoted followers are entombed in the walls. One of 
these is Bertrand, who followed him in his two exiles and to 
his two graves. The other is Duroc, who followed him in 
peace and war until he fell by his side in the Saxon campaign 
of 1813, when the Emperor in his bitter contempt for the in- 
gratitude of man, praised his fallen servitor for having the 
faithfulness and affection of a dog. Like a dog, then let it 
be, the grand marshal of the palace still keeps watch at the 
door while the master rests in untroubled sleep. 

Nothing in the Invalides better emphasises its monumental 
grandeur than three slabs of stone in one of the small rooms 
off the church. They are the uncarved covering of the un- 
marked grave beneath the willows at St. Helena. Yet this 
grave at the Invalides, too, has been left nameless. After all, 
whether with sword or pen, with axe or scythe, a man cuts his 
own epitaph. 



490 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

Following Sedan there was a violent reaction from the Na- 
poleonic idolatry of the Second Empire. Scepticism and con- 
demnation swiftly ran to an extreme as great as the blind 
credulity of the idol worshippers. The Napoleonic legend was 
furiously torn to tatters and its central figure was transformed 
from a mythological deity into the scapegoat of modern times ; 
from an impossible demigod he was distorted into an impos- 
sible demon. 

Time has checked that reaction and softened the rage of the 
iconoclasts, who no sooner overcame the base habit of looking 
up to Napoleon than they fell into the opposite baseness of 
flattering themselves by looking down on him. It is difficult 
to take a horizontal view of one whose life and character 
touched heights so lofty and sounded depths so abysmal. As 
the world increases in understanding, men will be enabled to 
look a Napoleon in the eye and view him on a level with them- 
selves, when, perhaps, he will lose their awe but gain their 
charity. As history grows democratic, it will become more 
and more like nature herself, careless of the single life and 
careful of the type. We are now too prone to magnify a man 
and to minify mankind, to forget that no one stands — or falls 
— alone, and that not merely some men but that all men are 
creatures of circumstances. 

We have seen Napoleon at twenty-four, a drifting, unam- 
bitious man, apparently of the common mould ; mediocre in 
school ; an indifferent soldier ; unkempt and awkward in the 
salon, emitting not a flash of that genius which he was so soon 
and suddenly to radiate before a dazzled world. We have seen 
him unstirred by the Great Revolution, when it had been rag- 
ing about his head for a half dozen years ; and deaf to the 
loud knockings of opportunity, which had aroused so many 
of his comrades. We have seen him shunning military serv- 
ice, running away from France and trying all the while to 
stay in his native island. We have seen him aimlessly loiter- 
ing in the streets of Paris, where, like a juror at a coroner's 
inquest, he was suddenly called out of the crowd. 

Surely 500, maybe 1000, army officers had more experience 
and reputation than he when he was placed on horseback. He 



ACROSS A CENTURY 491 

was nobody, not even a Frenchman ; but authority and law, 
rank, wealth, and seniority had all been swept away in the 
Revolution and the whole structure of society was turned up- 
side down. The slate had been wiped clean when the mighty 
social forces, clamouring for an agent, seized on this chance 
passer-by and flooded him with their overwhelming energy. 
"Thousands of ages will elapse before the circumstances ac- 
cumulated in my case draw forth another from among the 
crowd to reproduce the same spectacle," Napoleon himself 
said, at St. Helena. 

"The moment the boy put on a general's hat, he seemed to 
have grown two feet," said Massena. The shiftless, dawdling 
Corsican flew above the Alps. He leaped the Mediterranean. 
He dashed across the desert. He threw himself against the 
gate of the Orient, and its hinges, rusted by 500 years of dis- 
use, were shattered. He smote slothful Europe, and its 
mediaeval systems crumbled to dust. 

He infused armies, lawyers, artists, builders with the elec- 
tric force of the Revolution, and at his command, codes were 
formulated, arches and bridges were built, roads were made 
and canals were dug. 

His young head grew dizzy as he tread the peaks of great- 
ness. "I saw the world spinning beneath me, as if I were 
being carried through the air. ' ' The ruler of Italy at twenty- 
six; the despot of Egypt at twenty-eight; the dictator of 
France at thirty; the master of Europe at thirty-two, his 
youth was a grievous misfortune. The constitution of the 
United States bars men even from the senate until they are 
thirty, and from the presidency until they are thirty-five. 
Caasar was forty when he really began his career. This man 
had run his course before most rulers gain supreme power. 

The politicians of Europe, naturally enough, thought his 
power came from himself. "The world invited me to govern 
it. Sovereigns and subjects vied with one another in hasten- 
ing beneath my sceptre." 

Inevitably he came to share the general belief that he was 
the source and not merely the medium of the might with 
which he was invested. He thought he must be the favourite 



492 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

of fortune. He was the child of destiny. A lucky star must 
have shone at his birth. Assuming that he must have been 
born to rule, he crowned himself. Believing that his omnip- 
otence must be in his blood, he crowned his brothers and sis- 
ters, and divorced his wife that he might surely transmit the 
divine spark. 

He found himself the superman, set above and apart from 
his kind, and condemned to solitary imprisonment in a splen- 
did but pitiable isolation. His fanatical egotheism, his self- 
worship repelled his wives, his brothers, his sisters, his asso- 
ciates, whom he loaded with coronets and domains without 
making a friend among them all. Awe, dread and envy cut 
him off from the affections of men and women and left 
him filled with the bitterness of Byron 's cynical lines : 

He who surpasses or subdues mankind 
Must look down on the hate of those below. 

He despised men and challenged the impossible. "I may 
find the pillars of Hercules in Spain," he boasted, "but I 
shall not find the limits of my power." 

But he had struck down the Revolution, silenced the people 
and chained the forces that had filled him with the strength of 
a Colossus. He was still borne on, it is true, but only by the 
original momentum. Where once he had won campaigns with 
50,000 and 60,000 republicans, he now led 600,000 imperialists 
to disaster. At last no military genius was required to over- 
throw him, either at Leipsic or at the gates of Paris. Wel- 
lington only stood still at Waterloo while the greatest soldier 
of the age spent himself. 

Nevertheless, France brought him back from the grave after 
a quarter of a century and stirred his ashes in the vain hope 
that she might find a live cinder wherewith to kindle her 
glory anew. She transfused his living blood from the veins 
of Napoleon III into the anaemic body politic, but only to col- 
lapse at Sedan. Then at last she turned from the tomb, to 
discover in the red blood of her people the true source of her 
power, as it had been of Napoleon's. 

But the exile has his wish. His ashes repose on the banks 



ACROSS A CENTURY 493 

of the Seine, where the earth-hungry conqueror who felt him- 
self pent and stifled within the wide boundaries of Europe 
rests in the narrow empire of the grave — G^x!^ feet. 

There, facing the altar of the King of Kings and of that 
other victor of Mt. Tabor whose invincible sword, however, 
is not of the flesh and whose everlasting Kingdom is not of 
this world, he is enthroned with the vain, almost theatrical 
pomp and splendour of his brief imperial days. Five after- 
noons a week he holds his crowded court, with all the races 
of men for his courtiers. While they lean and muse on the 
marble balustrade, gazing down upon his majestic tomb, the 
slanting rays of the sun, transmuted into pure gold by the 
stained glass windows of the Chapel of the Dome, light up 
his violet red throne with a glory not of war nor of earth. 

Spite of all efforts to banish him from memory and con- 
sign him to an eternal exile, this man who was picked out of 
the street to embody common men, to be anointed, crowned, 
sceptred, empurpled and enthroned above the monarchs of 
long descent; this son of the people who made a mockery of 
the divinity of kings and the sacredness of ancient systems 
and customs, never has lost his dominion over the imagina- 
tion of men. His latest bibliography, compiled by a German, 
contains the titles of no less than 80,000 books that have been 
printed about him. In the catalogue of the British Museum, 
he distances every other man of action, only Jesus and Shakes- 
peare receiving more space on the shelves of that great library. 
He remains supreme in the admiration and the disappoint- 
ment, in the applause and the reproach of men : 

The glory, jest and riddle of the world. 

Had he not lost his touch with the people he would rule the 
globe from his grave. Had he kept his face to the future and 
not turned it to the past, the earth would be his empire and 
the human race his subjects. Had he only seen and welcomed 
the dawning of this age of democracy, he would be its prophet, 
and the Invalides would be more than a brilliant spectacle ; 
it would be the shrine of mankind. 



CHRONOLOGY OF NAPOLEON 

1769 
August 15, Napoleon Bonaparte born at Ajaecio. 

1778 
December 15, went to France. 

1779 
March 15, entered school at Brienne. 

1784 
October 31, entered Ecole Militaira at Paris. 

1785 
September 28, graduated — October 30, joined his regiment at 
Valence. 

1788 
June 15, joined his regiment at Auxonne. 

1791 
June 1, promoted to first lieutenant and returned to Valence. 

1792 
February 6, dropped from the French army — March 31, elected 
lieutenant-colonel Corsican national guard — July 10, restored to the 
French army — August 30, appointed captain. 

1793 
June 10, banished from Corsica — October 18, chief of battalion at 
siege of Toulon — December 19, fall of Toulon — December 22, Napo- 
leon brigadier general of artillery. 

1794 
August 12, arrested — August 20, released. 

1795 
March 11, sailed on Corsican expedition — May 2, ordered to Army 
of the West — September 15, ordered to Turkey; dropped from list 
of generals — October 5, suppressed revolt in streets of Paris — Octo- 
ber 16, general-in-chief of the Army of the Interior. 

495 



496 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

1796 
March 2, general-in-chief of the Army of Italy — March 9, married 
Josephine Beauharnais — April 9, joined army at Savona — April 12, 
defeated Austrians at Montenotte — April 13, defeated Sardinians at 
Millesimo — April 14, separated Sardinians and Austrians — April 15, 
defeated Austrians at Dego — April 22, defeated Sardinians at Mon- 
dovi — April 28, made peace with Sardinia — May 10, won Battle of 
Lodi — July, founded Cisalpine and Transpadane republics — August 
3, won Battle of Lonato — August 5, Castiglione — September 5, Ro- 
verado — September 8, Bassano — November 12, defeated at Caldiero 
— November 15, 16, 17, won Battle of Arcole. 

1797 
January 14, won Battle of Rivoli — January 16, La Favorita — Feb- 
ruary 3, captured Mantua — March 24, won Battle of Tarvis — March 

29, captured Klagenfurt — April 18, arranged armistice with Austria 
at Leoben — May, founded Ligurian and Venetian republics — Octo- 
ber, united Transpadane with Cisalpine republic — October 17, made 
Peace of Campo Formio — December 5, returned to Paris. 

1798 
May 19, sailed for Egypt — June 11, captured Malta — July 2, cap- 
tured Alexandria — July 21, won Battle of the Pyramids — August 1, 
lost his fleet at Battle of the Nile — September 11, Turkey declared 
war against him — October 21, Cairo revolted against him. 

1799 

February 10, began his Syrian campaign — March 7, captured Jaffa 
— March 17, began siege of Acre — April 16, won Battle of Mt. Tabor 
— May 17, retreated from Acre — June 14, returned to Cairo — July 
25, won Battle of Aboukir — August 23, took flight for France — Oc- 
tober 9, landed in France — November 10, at the head of a pro- 
visional government in France — December 25, First Consul for ten 
years, 

1800 

January, reorganised the judiciary and the government, reformed 
tax system and established Bank of France — May 14, began his 
march over the Alps — June 14, won Battle of Marengo — September 

30, made a treaty with the United States — October 1, secretly pur- 
chased Louisiana from Spain — December 22, Moreau defeated Aus- 
trians at Hohenlinden — December 24, Napoleon escaped infernal 
machine. 



CHRONOLOGY OF NAPOLEON 497 

1801 

February 9, made peace with Austria at Luneville — June 27, the 
French surrendered Cairo — July 15, Napoleon concluded the Con- 
cordat — October 1, sent expedition to conquer Santo Domingo. 

1802 

March 27, made peace with England at Amiens — August 1, First 
Consul for life. 

1803 

March 5, decreed the Code Napoleon — May 21, ratified sale of 
Louisiana to the United States the day war with England began — 
June 29, pitched his camp at Boulogne — August 23, royalist assassins 
landed in France. 

1804 

March 24, Duke d'Enghien shot — March 25, electoral colleges in- 
vited Napoleon to found a dynasty — May 18, the senate proclaimed 
him Emperor of the French — November 30, religious marriage to 
Josephine — December 2, crowned. 

1805 

May 26, crowned King of Italy — August 29, broke camp at Bou- 
logne and abandoned invasion of England — September 25, Grand 
Army crossed the Rhine — October 20, captured Ulm — October 21, 
Battle of Trafalgar — November 13, Napoleon entered Vienna — De- 
cember 2, won Battle of Austerlitz — December 26, Peace of Press- 
burg; Napoleon promoted the Elector of Bavaria to be King. 

1806 

January 1, promoted the Elector of Wiirtemberg to be King — 
February 18, made Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples — June 6, 
Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland — July 12, formed the Confed- 
eration of the Rhine — October 14, overwhelmed Prussians and Sax- 
ons at Jena and Auerstadt — October 28, entered Berlin — November 
21, issued Berlin Decree — December 11, promoted the Elector of 
Saxony to be King. 

1807 
Februaiy 7-8, Battle of Eylau — May 4, death of Napoleon's fa- 
vourite nephew and probable heir — June 14, Napoleon won Battle of 
Friedland — July 7-9, Peace of Tilsit — November 18, Napoleon made 
Jerome Bonaparte, King of Westphalia — December 17, issued Milan 
Decree. 

1808 
May 2, Spanish Revolution began — June 6, Napoleon made Jo- 



498 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON 

seph Bonaparte, King of Spain — July 19, French army in Spain 
surrendered at Baylen — July 21, French army in Portugal defeated 
by Wellesley — July 28, King Joseph fled from Madrid — August 1, 
Napoleon made Murat, King of Naples — September 27, met the 
Czar at Erfurt — December 4, entered Madrid. 

1809 

April 13, opened campaign against Austria — May 12, entered Vi- 
enna — May 17, annexed Rome — May 20-21, defeated at Aspern-Ess- 
ling — July 6, arrested Pope Pius VII — July 6-7, won Battle of 
Wagram — October 14, made treaty of peace with Austria — December 
15, divorced Josephine. 

1810 

March 11, married Marie Louise by proxy — July 1, King Louis 
fled from Holland. 

1811 

March 20, birth of the King of Rome. 

1812 

June 24, Napoleon entered Russia — June 28-July 16, at Vilna — 
July 26-August 13, at Vitebsk — August 16-24, at Smolensk — Sep- 
tember 7, Battle of Borodino — September 15, Napoleon entered 
Moscow — September 15-18, Moscow burning — October 19, Napoleon 
began his retreat — October 27, the first frost — October 30, bread and 
beef exhausted — November 4, first snow — November 17, Napoleon 
won Battle of Krasnoi — November 27, crossed the Beresina — De- 
cember 6, left the army — December 18, arrived in Paris. 

1813 
April 15, left Paris for the German campaign — May 2, won Bat- 
tle of Liitzen — May 20-21, won Battle of Bautzen — June 21, King 
Joseph fled from Spain — August 26-27, Napoleon won Battle of 
Dresden — October 16-18, overthrown at Leipsic — November 9, re- 
turned to Paris. 

1814 
January 21, released Pope Pius VII — January 26, left for cam- 
paign in, France — January 29, won Battle of Brienne — February 1, 
lost Battle of La Rothiere — February 10, won Battle of Champau- 
bert — February 11, won Battle of Montmirail — February 14, won 
Battle of Chateau Thierry — February 18, won Battle of Montereau 
— March 7, fought Battle of Craone — March 20, narrowly escaped at 
Arcis sur Aube — March 29, Marie Louise and King of Rome fled 



CHRONOLOGY OF NAPOLEON 499 

from Paris — March 30, fall of Paris — March 31, Napoleon at Fon- 
tainebleau — April 6, abdicated — April 11, attempted to commit sui- 
cide — April 20, started for Elba — May 29, death of Josephine. 

1815 
February 26, Napoleon sailed from Elba — March 1, landed in 
France — March 20, entered Paris — June 14, began the Belgian cam- 
paign — June 16, won Battle of Ligny — June 18, overthrown at 
Waterloo — June 21, returned to Paris — June 22, abdicated — July 
15, went aboard the British warship, Bellerophon — August 9, sailed 
on the Northumberland for St. Helena — October 16, landed on St. 
Helena — December 10, took up his residence at Longwood. 

1816 
April 14, Sir Hudson Lowe arrived at St. Helena — August 18, 
his last interview with Napoleon. 

1818 
September 28, British government ordered Napoleon to show him- 
self to an officer twice a day. 

1821 
May 5, death of Napoleon. 

1832 
July 22, death of the King of Rome. 

1840 
December 15, the body of Napoleon placed in the Hotel des In- 
valides in Paris. 



THE BONAPARTES 

Carlo Maria Bonaparte, b. 1746, d. 1785; married Letizia Ramo- 
lino, b. 1750, d. 1836. Eight of their children lived to maturity. 

I Joseph, King of Naples and Spain, b. 1768, d. 1844; married 
Julie Clary and had two daughters; one married a son of Louis 
Bonaparte but left no children, and the other married Prince Charles 
Bonaparte, a son of Lucien ; one of their sons became Cardinal 
Bonaparte and one of their grandchildren the wife of the Prince 
of the Moskva, great grandson of Marshal New 

II Napoleon, Emperor of the French, Kin l;- of Italy, b. 1769, d. 
1S21 ; married Josephine Taseher de la Pa.Lrerie Beauharnais; di- 
vorced: married Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria; their only 
son, iiic Kin-- of h'oine, died without children. 

III Lucien, Prince of Canino, b. 1775, d. 1840; married Chris- 
tine Boyer; deceased; married Alexandrine Jouberthin; four sons 
and three daughters; one bod married a daughter of Joseph, as al- 
ready noted; two other sons died without children; the fourth son 
became the father of Prince Roland Bonaparte who married the 
daughter of M. Blanc of Monte Carlo, and their daughter is the 
Princess Marie, wife of Prince George of Greece. 

IV Elisa, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, h. 1777, d. 1820; married 
Felix Bacchiochi; one son and one daughter. 

V Louis, King of Holland, b. 1778, d. 1846; married Hortense, 
daughter of the Empress Josephine; three sons, the third of whom 
ascended his uncle's throne as Napoleon III. 

VI Pauline, Princess of Guastalla, b. 1780, d. 1825; married 
General Leclerc; deceased; married Prince Borghese of Rome, but 
left no children. 

\ II Caroline, Queen of Naples, b. 1782, d. 1839; married Murat, 
King of Naples; two sons. 

VIII Jerome, King of Westphalia, b. 1784, d. 1860; married 
Elizabeth Paterson of Baltimore; one son; Charles Joseph Bona- 
parte, formerly Attorney General of the United States, is a grand- 
son, and Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte of Washington a great 
grandson; the American marriaare having: been declared void under 

^500 



CHRONOLOGY OF NAPOLEON 501 

the French law, Jerome married Princess Catherine of Wiirtemberg; 
two sons and one daughter; one of the sons, Napoleon Joseph 
Charles, "Plon Plon," married the Duchess Clothilda of Savoy, 
daughter of Victor Emmanuel II, King of Italy, and their elder 
son, Victor Napoleon who married Princess Clementine of Belgium, 
is the head of the house of Bonaparte and pretender to the throne ; 
the second son, Napoleon Louis, formerly was a general in the Rus- 
sian army, and a sister of these two, the Princess Letizia, is the 
widow of Amadeo, Duke of Aosta, who in 1872 was elected King of 
Spain but who abdicated the throne. 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Aboukir, Egypt, Battle of, 108, 
109. 

Acre, Syria, Siege of, 97-106. 

Adams, John Quincy, on the cause 
of the Russian war, 320. 

Alexander I of Russia, ordered 
mourning for the Duke d'En- 
ghien, 166; mistook Napoleon's 
appeals for confession of weak- 
ness, 194; eager to see a battle, 
195 ; at the Battle of Austerlitz, 
199-201 : his flight after the bat- 
tle, 204; his pledge to Frederick 
William III over tomb of Fred- 
erick the Great, 219; with King 
and Queen of Prussia at Memel, 
236; at Tilsit, 240-245; his re- 
union with Napoleon at Erfurt, 
269; paltering with Napoleon 
over marriage proposal, 299 ; his 
refusal to shut out American 
ships and estrangement from 
Napoleon, 320, 321; at the fron- 
tier when Napoleon invaded 
Russia, 331; his defiance, 3^6; 
his medal commemorating the 
repulse of Napoleon, 349 ; the 
leader of the people's revolt 
against Napoleon, 361, 362; re- 
treating at Bautzen, 367 ; at 
the Battle of Leipsic, 379; in 
the campaign of 1814, 385; his 
insistence on making a drive at 
Paris, 391; entering Paris, 395; 
his visits to Josephine, 400, 401 ; 
his inauguration of the Holy 
Alliance, 473. 



505 



Alvinzi, General, repulsed Napo- 
leon at Caldiero, 56; defeated 
by Napoleon at Arcole, 57-59; 
at Rivoli, 60, 61. 

Antommarchi, Francesco, Dr., phy- 
sician to Napoleon at St. He- 
lena, 469, 470'; rebuffed by Marie 
Louise, 477, 478. 

Arcole, Italy, Battle of, 57-59. 

Aspern-Essling, Austria, Battle of, 
275-277. 

Auerstadt, Prussia, Battle of, 224. 

Augureau, General, at Battle of 
Eylau, 234 ; his death, 488. 

Augusta, Princess of Bavaria, be- 
trothed to Eugene Beauharnais 
by Napoleon, 206. 

Austerlitz, Austria, Battle of, 193- 
205. 

Austria, her campaign against 
France in 1796, 47; returning to 
attack of Napoleon fifth time, 
60; brought to terms, 64; ceded 
Belgium to France, 72; received 
Venice from Napoleon, 72; the 
Austrian campaign of 1800, 119; 
in the third coalition, 185 ; over- 
whelmed at Ulm, 186-191; con- 
quered at Austerlitz and surren- 
dered last foothold in Italy and 
on the Adriatic, 204 ; her treaty 
with Napoleon in 1S09, 280, 281 ; 
seeking matrimonial alliance 
with Napoleon, 299, 300; rejoic- 
ing over the marriage of Marie 
Louise, 302 ; permitted violation 
of treaty pledges to Napoleon at 



506 



INDEX 



his abdication, 413, 414; her 
commissioner to St. Helena re- 
buffed by Napoleon, 466. 



Balmain, Count, Russian commis- 
sioner at St. Helena, 466. 

Bathurst, Lord, his untimely fear 
of Napoleon's escape from St. 
Helena, 470. 

Bautzen, Saxony, Battle of, 367. 

Bavaria, raised to a kingdom by 
Napoleon, 213. 

Bavaria, King of, with Napoleon 
on eve of Russian campaign, 329. 

Beauharnais, Alexandre de, mar- 
riage to Josephine, 39, 40: his 
death, 41. 

Beauharnais, Eugene, his birth, 
40; asking Napoleon for his fa- 
ther's sword, 42; with his step- 
father at Acre, 104; his mar- 
riage with Augusta, 206; Vice- 
roy of Italy and heir to Italian 
crown, 216; Napoleon's instruc- 
tions to, on domestic relations, 
283 ; at the divorce of his 
mother, 296-297; with Napoleon 
on eve of Russian campaign, 
330; his presentiment of the 
Moscow disaster, 338; on the 
retreat, 354-358. 

Beauharnais, Fanny, approved 
Josephine's marriage to Napo- 
leon, 44. 

Beauharnais, Hortense, her birth, 
40; her loveless marriage to 
Louis Bonaparte, 157-158; death 
of her eldest son, 216, 217; Na- 
poleon's tribute to her, 283; at 
the divorce of her mother, 296; 
her tomb, 401; at Napoleon's 
final overthrow, 450; her part- 
ing gift to him, 451. 

Beauharnais, Stephanie, betrothed 
to Prince of Baden by Napoleon, 



206; the spoiled child of the 
Empire, 283. 

Beaulieu, Marshal, outwitted by 
Napoleon, 48. 

Beethoven, Ludwig Van, recalled a 
dedication to Napoleon, 259. 

Belgium, taken from Austria by 
France, 72 ; England determined 
to expel Napoleon from, 388. 

Bernadotte, Marshal, at the Battle 
of Austerlitz, 200; in the Jena 
campaign, 220; his antecedents, 
247, 248; at Wagram, 278; his 
selection as crown prince of 
Sweden, 323, 324; in arms 
against Napoleon, 371. 

Berthier, Marshal, at Battle of 
Eylau, 234; with Napoleon in 
Spain, 269; with Napoleon in 
Austria, 273; at the first abdica- 
tion, 397; his death, 488. 

Bertrand, General, with Napoleon 
at Elba, 403 ; joined him in his 
St. Helena exile, 456; his at- 
tendance on him at Longwood, 
462; returned to St. Helena to 
escort Napoleon's body to 
France, 485, 486; his tomb at 
the Invalides, 489. 

Bertrand, Mme., attempted suicide 
rather than go to St. Helena, 
461; by Napoleon's deathbed, 
471. 

Bessieres, Marshal, his ante- 
cedents, 247, 248 ; in the Danube 
campaign, 276; his death, 367; 
his tomb in the Invalides, 487. 

Blticher, General, recalled to the 
Prussian army, 365, 366; in 
the campaign of 1813, 373; 
in the campaign of 1814, 385; 
at the Battle of Brienne, 386; at 
the Battle of La Rothiere, 387; 
hurled back by Napoleon, 389; 
repulsed Napoleon, 390; fooled 
in the Hundred Days, 428; his 



INDEX 



507 



army, 429; at the Battle of 
Ligny, 430, 431; his assurance 
to Wellington on the eve of 
Waterloo, 433; marching to 
Waterloo, 439; at Waterloo, 
443-446; wished to shoot Napo- 
leon, 450. 

Bombelles, Count, third husband 
of Marie Louise, 483. 

Bonaparte, Betsy Paterson, her 
marriage to Jerome Bonaparte, 
206-212; son born, 209; her de- 
scendants, 211; political effect 
of the Pope's refusal to annul 
her marriage, 322. 

Bonaparte, Carlo, wished to fol- 
low Paoli to England, 6 ; entered 
Napoleon at school in Brienne, 
13; his character, 13, 14; noble 
deputy at Versailles, 14; his 
death, 20. 

Bonaparte, Caroline, left behind in 
flight of Bonapartes from Ajac- 
cio, 29; her marriage with Mu- 
rat, 157; the most ambitious of 
Napoleon's sisters, 214, 215; her 
death, 483. 

Bonaparte, Charles Joseph, attor- 
ney-general of the United States 
and grandson of King Jerome 
Bonaparte, 211. 

Bonaparte, Elisa, flight from Aj ac- 
tio, 29; her passion for power, 
215; her death, 482. 

Bonaparte, Jerome, left behind in 
flight of Bonapartes from Aj ac- 
tio, 29; his heirs excluded from 
imperial succession, 168 ; his 
marriage with Betsy Paterson 
of Baltimore, 206-212; son born, 
209; his marriage with Princess 
Catherine of Wurtemberg, 209; 
King of Westphalia, 210; his ex- 
travagances, 214; with Napoleon 
in the invasion of Russia, 331; 
his kingdom engulfed, 370; at 



Waterloo, 439; his tomb at the 
Invalides, 489. 

Bonaparte, Jerome Napoleon, born 
to Betsy Paterson, 209 ; ignored 
in father's will, 210; declined 
dukedom in Second Empire, 210; 
graduated from Harvard, 210; 
married American girl, 211; left 
two sons, 211. 

Bonaparte, Colonel Jerome Napo- 
leon, son of Jerome Napoleon 
Bonaparte and grandson of 
King Jerome Bonaparte, 211. 

Bonaparte, Jerome Napoleon, 
great grandson of King Jerome, 
211. 

Bonaparte, Joseph, birthplace, 5; 
at school with Napoleon in 
France, 14; accompanied Jose- 
phine to Italy, 54; negotiated 
Treaty of Mortefontaine with 
the United States, 143 ; his heirs 
in line of imperial succession, 
168; a prince of the Empire, 
169; made King of Naples, 213; 
appointed King of Spain, 266, 
267; confronted by revolution, 
267-270; his flight from Spain, 
370; chief adviser of Marie 
Louise as regent, 385; offered 
Napoleon his cabin in a ship 
bound to the United States, 452; 
his tomb at the Invalides, 489. 

Bonaparte, Letizia, in the Corsican 
revolution, 5; described, 6; op- 
posed husband's desire to follow 
Paoli to England, 6; her tomb 
described, 10; her visit to Na- 
poleon at school, 15; in poverty, 
25; fleeing from the Paolists, 
29; handsomely remembered by 
Napoleon in the first hour of 
victory, 68; the trials and fears 
of Mme. Mere in the Empire, 
215, 216; her lack of affection, 
291; with Napoleon at Elba, 



508 



INDEX 



410; the only one in the secret 
of the projected flight, 415; her 
parting call before Napoleon's 
surrender to England, 451; her 
life after the fall of the Empire, 
482, 483; her death, 483. 

Bonaparte, Louis, educated by Na- 
poleon, 26; flight from Ajaccio, 
29; to the rescue of Napoleon at 
Arcole, 58; his loveless marriage 
with Hortense Beauharnais, 157, 
158; his heirs in line of imperial 
succession, 168; a prince of the 
Empire, 169; made King of Hol- 
land, 214; death of his eldest 
son, 216, 217; his flight from the 
throne, 323. 

Bonaparte, Lucien, President of 
the Five Hundred, 113; his heirs 
excluded from imperial succes- 
sion, 168; rejected crowns in 
loyalty to his wife, 214; his 
death, 483. 

Bonaparte, Pauline, flight from 
Ajaccio, 29; created Duchess, 
215; only sister with any affec- 
tion for Napoleon, 283; with 
him at Elba, 410; her death, 
482. 

Bonaparte, Victor, receiving pil- 
grims from Ajaccio, 30; pre- 
tender, 211. 

Borodino, Russia, Battle of, 337, 
338. 

Bourrienne, Louis Antoine Fauve- 
let de, Napoleon's schoolmate at 
Brienne, 17; with him in the 
Revolution, 27 ; became his sec- 
retary, 69; settling Josephine's 
bills, 155, 156; his betrayal of 
Napoleon and his dismissal, 
162, 163; conniving at the resto- 
ration of the Bourbons, 396. 

Brazil, her empire founded by 
Portuguese royal family in flight 
from Napoleon, 266. 



Brienne, France, Battle of, 386. 

Browning, Robert, his poem on 
Napoleon, 273. 

Brune, Marshal, his antecedents, 
247, 248. 

Biilow, General, in the campaign 
of 1814, 385; at Waterloo, 440, 
442, 444. 

Buonvita, Father, one of Napo- 
leon's priests at St. Helena, 469. 

Caldiero, Italy, Battle of, 56. 

Cambaceres, Chancellor, appointed 
arch chancellor of the Empire, 
169; dread of Napoleon's mar- 
riage with Marie Louise, 301. 

Cambronne, General, with Napo- 
leon at Elba, 403; Napoleon's 
orders to him on return from 
Elba, 417; "The Old Guard dies 
but never surrenders," 445. 

Campbell, Colonel, warned British 
government that Napoleon 
would leave Elba unless treaty 
were fulfilled, 413; fooled by 
Napoleon, 415, 416. 

Campo Formio, Italy, the Peace of, 
72. 

Carteaux, General, Napoleon's 
commander at Toulon, 32; pen- 
sioned by First Consul, 148. 

Castiglione, Italy, Battle of, 55. 

Catherine, Princess of Wiirtem- 
berg, married to Jerome Bona- 
parte, 209; Napoleon's kindness 
to, 283. 

Caulaincourt, Armand de, with Na- 
poleon in Spain, 269; on Napo- 
leon's forgiveness, 317; on the 
Russian retreat, 357; with Na- 
poleon at the fall of Paris, 394, 
395. 

Champaubert, France, Battle of, 
389. 

Charles, Arch Duke of Austria, 
his retreat before Napoleon, 62- 



INDEX 



509 



64; his retreat in 1809, 273; at 
Aspern-Essling and Wagram, 
275-279; proxy of Napoleon at 
marriage of Marie Louise, 304. 

Charles X of France, sent to repel 
Napoleon on his return from 
Elba, 421; abandoned his com- 
mand, 423. 

Chateau Thierry, France, Battle 
of, 389. 

Cockburn, Admiral, in charge of 
Napoleon on the voyage to St. 
Helena, 457. 

Code Napoleon, 140. 

Colombier, Mile., Napoleon's first 
sweetheart, 23; remembered by 
him in days of his power, 282. 

Concordat, The, 138-140. 

Consalvi, Cardinal, negotiated the 
Concordat, 139. 

Constant, married by Napoleon, 
286 ; dressing him to meet Marie 
Louise, 306; neglected to give 
him waterproof boots at Boro- 
dino, 337; abandoned his fallen 
master in 1814, 398. 

Davout, Marshal, in the school at 
Brienne, 19; at Ulm, 190; at the 
Battle of Austerlitz, 201, 202; 
won the Battle of Auerstadt, 
224; at Battle of Eylau, 235; 
his antecedents, 247, 248; cut 
off by the Danube, 276; at Wag- 
ram, 279; on the Russian re- 
treat, 354-358; ordered Napo- 
leon out of Paris in 1815, 449. 

Demidoff, Prince, his museum in 
Elba, 408; his yearly memorial 
service for Napoleon, 412. 

Demoulin, Jean, presented $20,000 
to Napoleon on return from 
Elba, 422. 

Denmark, Napoleon and Czar de- 
termined to close her ports 
against England, 244 ; renounced 



her alliance with Napoleon in 
1814; ceded Norway to Sweden 
and Heligoland to England, 384. 

Desaix, General, saving the day at 
Marengo, 129; his death, 130. 

Dresden, Saxony, Battle of, 373- 
375; the field to-day, 374-376. 

Drouot, General, at the Battle of 
Lutzen, 366; with Napoleon at 
Elba, 403 ; his fatal advice at 
Waterloo, 434. 

Dupont, General, surrendered Na- 
poleonic eagles in Spain for first 
time, 268. 

Duroc, General, appointed grand 
marshal of the palace, 169; at 
Tilsit, 241 ; returning from 
Spain with Napoleon, 271; on 
Napoleon's absolutism, 316, 317; 
on the Russian retreat, 357; his 
death, 368 ; Napoleon thought 
of taking his name after Water- 
loo, 453; his tomb at the Inva- 
lides, 489. 

Enghien, Due d', kidnapped by 
Napoleon's soldiers, 164; shot, 
165. 

England, war with France in 
1793, 28; her forces defeated at 
Toulon, 33, 34; the one uncon- 
quered foe of France in 1799, 
73; subsidised the Austrian 
campaign of 1800, 119; made 
peace with Napoleon in 1802, 
133; reopened war with France 
in 1803, 178-180; "The Great 
Terror" at time of Napoleon's 
threatened invasion, 181 ; in the 
third coalition, 185; her recog- 
nition of equality of flags at sea 
demanded by Russia, 244; her 
restrictions on neutral com- 
merce, 264; her alliance with 
Spanish revolutionists, 270; her 
wares boycotted by Napoleon, 



510 



INDEX 



286; her struggle against con- 
tinental system, 321, 322; most 
constant foe, 370, 371; received 
Heligoland from Denmark, 384; 
her determination to expel Na- 
poleon from Holland and Bel- 
gium, 388; permitted violation 
of treaty pledges to Napoleon at 
his abdication, 413, 414; warned 
by Col. Campbell, her commis- 
sioner in Elba, that Napoleon 
would leave unless treaty were 
fulfilled, 413, 414; her contin- 
gent at Waterloo, 438 ; her min- 
istry determined to take revenge 
on Napoleon, 455. 

Eugenie, Ex-Empress, owner of 
Napoleon's birthplace, 8. 

Eylau, East Prussia, Battle of, 
233-235. 

Egypt, conquered by Napoleon, 
77-85; conquered by England 
and restored to Turkey, 179. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, on Napo- 
leon's army at Eylau, 235; on 
Napoleon's memoirs, 260. 

Ferdinand VII, of Spain, surren- 
dered to Napoleon, 266; liber- 
ated, 384. 

Fesch, Joseph, Cardinal, his tomb 
at Ajaccio, 10; taught Napoleon 
the alphabet, 14; flight from 
Ajaccio, 29; performing reli- 
gious marriage of Napoleon and 
Josephine, 173; married Napo- 
leon and Marie Louise, 307; his 
vain appeal to Napoleon for 
moderation, 326; his parting 
call before Napoleon's surrender 
to England, 451; chose phy- 
sicians and priests for St. He- 
lena, 469. 

Finland, Napoleon consented to 
Russia taking it from Sweden, 
245. 



Flammarion, Camille, his villa on 
the site of a Napoleonic inn, 
394. 

Fouche, Joseph, warning Napoleon 
against the Bourbons, 161; spy- 
ing on the First Consul, 102; 
plotting the downfall of the Re- 
public, 166; his sharp retort on 
the Emperor, 169; at Napoleon's 
final overthrow, 449, 450. 

France, her conquest of Corsica, 
5-6; opening of the Revolution, 
25; revolutionary scenes in 
Paris, 27, 28; war with Eng- 
land in 1793, 28; the attempted 
revolution of Vendemiaire, 35- 
37 ; her campaign against Aus- 
tria in 1796, 47; took Belgium 
from Austria, 72; her struggle 
to conquer England, 73, 74; 
opened war with England the 
day Louisiana treaty was rati- 
fied, 145; conditions under the 
Consulate, 159, 160; restored 
statue of Napoleon to Vendome 
column, 254; her war weariness 
and refusal to rally to Napoleon 
in the Hundred Days, 426, 427; 
her commissioner to St. Helena 
rebuffed by Napoleon, 466; the 
Revolution of 1830 and the King 
of Rome, 479; found at last her 
redemption in democracy, 492. 

Francis I of Austria, mistook Na- 
poleon's appeals for peace as 
confession of weakness, 194; im- 
patient to recapture Vienna, 
195; at the Battle of Austerlitz, 
199-201; his meeting with Na- 
poleon after Austerlitz, 203; at 
the front in 1809, 274; his peace 
treaty with Napoleon in 1809, 
280, 281; anxious to sacrifice 
his daughter to Napoleon, 299; 
implored by her, 301; with Na- 
poleon on eve of Russian cam- 



INDEX 



511 



paign, 329; in the campaign of 
1813, 372, 373; at the Battle of 
Leipsic, 379; in the campaign 
of 1814, 385; commissioned 
Metternich to explain to King 
of Rome the downfall of Napo- 
leon, 476; his tomb, 484. 

Frederick William III of Prussia, 
ordered mourning for the Duke 
d'Enghien, 166; playing fast and 
loose with Napoleon, 218-220; 
his pledge to the Czar over the 
tomb of Frederick the Great, 
219; his retreat from Napoleon, 
227-237 ; snubbed at Tilsit, 240 ; 
interrogated by Napoleon, 241; 
received Napoleon's ultimatum, 
244; a vassal of Napoleon, 245; 
with him on eve of Russian cam- 
paign, 329; swept away on a 
tide of patriotism in 1813, 363; 
at the Battle of Leipsic, 379; 
in the campaign of 1814, 385; 
entering Paris, 395; his visit to 
Josephine, 401. 

Friedland, East Prussia, Battle of, 
236, 237. 

Fulton, Robert, vainly offered 
steamboat and torpedo to France 
and England, 180. 

Garibaldi, Giuseppe, at Elba, 405. 

George IV of England, Napoleon's 
appeal to him, 453. 

Georges, Cadoudal, leader in a 
Bourbon plot against First Con- 
sul, 163; his death, 164. 

Germany, her condition at opening 
of 19th century, 218; the realisa- 
tion of Queen Louise's vision, 
246; the rising of her people 
against Napoleon, 361-363. 

Gladstone, William E., on Napo- 
leon as an administrator, 261. 

Gourgaud, General, joined Napo- 
leon on his St. Helena exile, 456 ; 



his attendance at Longwood, 
462; returned to Europe, 468; 
suspected of a mission to King 
of Rome, 478; returned to St. 
Helena to escort Napoleon's 
body to France, 485, 486. 
Grouchy, Marshal, his antecedents, 
247, 248; sent in pursuit of 
Bliicher, 431 ; on the day of 
Waterloo, 433, 439-441. 

Holland, bestowed upon Louis Bon- 
aparte by Napoleon, 214; an- 
nexed, 323; England determined 
to expel Napoleon from, 388. 

Holland, Lord, a defender of Na- 
poleon in England, 464. 

Holy Alliance, inaugurated, 483; 
a league against liberty, 485. 

Hugo, Victor, at Elba, 405; the 
original of his character of Jean 
Valjean followed Napoleon to 
Waterloo, 420. 

Ilari, Camilla, Napoleon's foster 
mother, 6; pensioned by First 
Consul, 148; at Napoleon's cor- 
onation, 175. 

Italy, her war of liberation, 56; 
the corner stone of her union 
laid by Napoleon, 69, 70; Na- 
poleon crowned King of, 176. 

Jaffa, Palestine, the capture of 
and massacre of prisoners in, 
94-96; Napoleon in its plague 
hospital, 107. 

Jefferson, Thomas, his purchase of 
Louisiana, 144-146; troubled by 
the Bonaparte-Paterson mar- 
riage, 207. 

Jena, Saxe Weimar, Battle of, 
221-224. 

Jews, The, emancipated by Napo- 
leon, 259. 



512 



INDEX 



Joinville, Prince, brought Napo- 
leon's body from St. Helena, 
485. 

Jomini, General, abandoned Napo- 
leon in 1813, 372. 

Josephine, Empress, her girlhood 
in Martinique, 38-40; her voy- 
age to France and marriage to 
Alexandre de Beauharnais, 39, 
40; return to Martinique, 40; 
in the shadow of the guillotine, 
41; death of her husband, 41; 
her meeting with Napoleon, 42; 
her lawyer's protest against her 
marriage, 44; the marriage, 44, 
45; amused by her bridegroom's 
ardour, 49; joins him in Italy, 
53, 54; chiding letters from him, 
59; her life at Malmaison and 
her social leadership, 149-155; 
her extravagances in the Con- 
sulate, 155-157; her early dread 
of a crown and a divorce, and 
her wifely warnings, 157-158; 
her tearful appeals for the 
Duke d'Enghien, 165; her re- 
ligious marriage with Napoleon, 
172, 173; her coronation, 173— 
176; her last journey with Na- 
poleon, 272 ; her doom knelled, 
281; more extravagances and 
debts, 293 ; her usefulness to Na- 
poleon, 293-295 ; her divorce an- 
nounced, 295, 296; Napoleon's 
settlement on her, 295, 296; the 
divorce and parting, 297, 298; 
her last duty to Napoleon, 299- 
300; her attitude toward him 
after his second marriage, 307, 
308; her gift and visit to King 
of Rome, 312; her last days and 
her death, 400, 401 ; Napoleon's 
parting tribute to her memory 
before surrendering to England, 
451. 

Jourdan, Marshal, his antecedents, 



247, 248; his tomb in the Inva- 
lides at Paris, 487. 

Junot, General, with Napoleon at 
Toulon, 33; accompanied Jo- 
sephine to Italy, 54; in battle 
at the Horns of Hattin, 100; 
his expedition to Lisbon, 266 ; 
surrendered to Wellington, 268. 

Junot, Mme., her vengeful mem- 
oirs, 153. 

Kellermann, General, his charge at 
Marengo, 130. 

Kleber, General, in the campaign 
in Galilee, 100, 101 ; leading the 
last attack on Acre, 104; his 
tomb in the Invalides at Paris, 
487. 

Keith, Lord, read to Napoleon the 
sentence of banishment to St. 
Helena, 456. 

Kutusof, General, at the Battle of 
Borodino, 337, 338; abandoned 
Moscow, 340; his pursuit of Na- 
poleon on retreat, 351 ; his 
death, 366. 

Lab£doyere, Colonel, surrendered 
his regiment to Napoleon near 
Grenoble, 422; his death, 452. 

Lafayette, Marquis de, his pro- 
test against the consulate for 
life, 142; at Napoleon's final 
overthrow, 449. 

Lallemand, General, parting from 
Napoleon on the Bellerophon, 
456. 

Lannes, Marshal, wounded at Ar- 
cole, 58; wounded at Acre, 104; 
at Ulm, 190; in Jena campaign, 
220; at Battle of Friedland, 
236; his antecedents, 247, 248; 
at Essling, 275; his death, 277. 

Lannes, Mme., her dialogue with 
Napoleon, 289. 



INDEX 



513 



La Rothiere, France, Battle of, 
387. 

Las Cases, Emmanuel, Count de, 
his remark to Lord Keith on the 
Bellerophon, 456; receiving the 
dictation of Napoleon's "Mem- 
oirs" on the Northumberland, 
457 ; accompanied by his son to 
St. Helena, 461 ; teaching Eng- 
lish to Napoleon, 462, 463; ar- 
rested and deported, 468; his 
son returned to St. Helena to es- 
cort Napoleon's body to France, 
485, 486. 

La Tour d'Auvergne, first grena- 
dier of France, "dead on the 
field of honour," 188; his tomb 
in the Invalides at Paris, 487. 

Lavalette, General de, his escape 
from prison, 452. 

Lavalette, Mme. de, niece of 
Fanny Beauharnais, at Jo- 
sephine's coronation, 175; de- 
livered her husband from prison, 
452. 

Lefebre, Marshal, husband of Mme. 
Sans Gene, won to Napoleon's 
plot against the Directory, 112; 
captured Dantzic, 236; his an- 
tecedents, 247, 248; at the first 
abdication, 397; his death, 488. 

Leipsic, Saxony, Battle of, and its 
field to-day, 376-381. 

Leon, Count de, son of Napoleon, 
290. 

Ligny, Belgium, Battle of, 430. 

Livingston, Robert R., negotiat- 
ing for the purchase of Louisi- 
ana, 144-146; in a stormy scene 
at the Tuileries, 179; declined to 
interfere in Bonaparte-Paterson 
marriage difficulty, 207. 

Lodi, Italy, Battle of, 50-51. 

Lonato, Italy, Battle of, 55. 

Louise, Queen of Prussia, rallied 
the war party in 1806, 219; her 



flight before Napoleon from Jena 
to Memel, 226-229, 231, 232; her 
statue at Tilsit, 238; her house 
at Tilsit, 239; her visit to Til- 
sit, 242-244; years of poverty 
and sorrow, 245; her death, her 
children, her tomb, 246; her 
daughter married to Nicholas I 
of Russia, 246. 

Louisiana, its sale to the United 
States by Napoleon, 143-146. 

Louis Philippe, King of France, 
restored statue of Napoleon to 
Vendome column, 253; en- 
throned by the Revolution of 
1830, 479; brought Napoleon's 
body from St. Helena and buried 
it in the Invalides, 485-487. 

Louis XVI of France, on whose 
bounty Napoleon was educated, 
13; Napoleon present when 
King was mobbed, 28, 29. 

Louis XVIII, his attempt to 
bribe Napoleon, 160, 161; 
wished to remove Napoleon 
from Elba, 414; his flight from 
Paris at the approach of Na- 
poleon, 424. 

Lowe, Hudson, in the campaign 
of 1813, 371; commended Water- 
loo as battlefield, 437 ; chosen to 
be Napoleon's custodian at St. 
Helena, 464; his iron rule, 464- 
472; refused to permit Napo- 
leon's heart to be sent to Marie 
Louise, 471. 

Liitzen, Prussia, Battle of, 366. 

Macdonald, Marshal, his ante- 
cedents, 247, 248; at Wagram, 
279; swam to safety at Leipsic, 
381 ; at the first abdication, 397; 
fled from Napoleon at Lyons, 
423. 

Mack, General, defeated by Na- 
poleon at Ulm, 190-191. 



514 



INDEX 



Maitland, Captain, his reception 
of Napoleon on the Bellero- 
phon, 453-455. 

Malta, conquered by Napoleon, 76; 
the cause of the great Anglo- 
French war in 1803, 179. 

Mantua, Italy, captured by Na- 
poleon, U2. 

Marchand, Napoleon's valet at 
St. Helena. 469j by Napoleon's 
deathbed, 471; returned to St. 
Helena to escort Napoleon's 
body to France, 485, 486. 

Marengo, Italy, Battle of, 127-134. 

Marie Louise, Empress, her first 
fligbt from Napoleon, 64; in 
flight again from Napoleon, 191; 
her third flight from Napoleon, 
274; her betrothal to Napoleon, 
299-304; her marriage and jour- 
ney to Paris, 304-309; birth and 
christening of King of Rome, 
310-313; surprised by Napo- 
leon on his return from Russia, 
360; invested with the regency 
in 1814, 385; her flight from 
Paris, 392 ; carried off to Aus- 
tria, 400; easily alienated from 
Napoleon, 409; her letter on Na- 
poleon's death, 477; her mor- 
ganatic marriage to Count Neip- 
perg, 477; her opposition to the 
reception of Napoleon's heart, 
477, 478; her neglect of her son, 
480, 481 ; her third marriage, 
483; her death, 483; her tomb, 
484. 

Marmont, Marshal, rescued Na- 
poleon at Arcole, 58; at Ulm, 
190; his antecedents, 247, 248; 
on Napoleon as a lover, 282; at 
the fall of Paris in 1814, 393; 
at the first abdication, 397; de- 
scribed to King of Rome Na- 
poleon's campaigns, 476. 

Massena, Marshal, his first meet- 



ing with Napoleon, 46; his ante- 
cedents, 247, 248; at Aspern, 
276, 277. 

Melas, General, defeated by Na- 
poleon at Marengo, 129. 

Meneval, Baron de, succeeded 
Bourrienne, 162. 

Metternieh, Mme., receiving Jo- 
sephine's proposal that Marie 
Louise marry Napoleon, 299, 
300. 

Metternieh, Prince, plotting to 
marry Marie Louise to Napo- 
leon, 299-302 ; his famous inter- 
\ iew with Napoleon at Dresden, 
.".tilt, 370; plotting to alienate 
Marie Louise from Napoleon, 
409; commissioned by Francis I 
to explain to the King of Rome 
the downfall of Napoleon, 476; 
master of the Holy Alliance, 
485. 

Moncey, Marshal, his antecedents, 
247, 248; at the fall of Paris 
in 1814, 393; at the burial of 
Napoleon in the Invalides, 487; 
his tomb, 487. 

Monroe, James, negotiating for the 
purchase of Louisiana, 144-146. 

Montalivet, M. de, a count of the 
Empire, 282. 

Montchenu, Count, French com- 
missioner at St. Helena, 466. 

Montenotte, Italy, Battle of, 48. 

Montereau, France, Battle of, 389. 

Montesquieu, Mme. de, governess 
of the King of Rome, 313. 

Montholon, Count de, joined Na- 
poleon in St. Helena exile, 456; 
his attendance at Longwood, 
462; by the death bed, 470, 
471. 

Montholon, Countess de, her mar- 
riage objected to by Napoleon, 
461; returned to Europe from 
St. Helena, 468. 



INDEX 



515 



Montmirail, France, Battle of, 
389. 

Moore, Sir John, his expedition 
against Napoleon, 270. 

Moreau, General, his victory at 
Hohenlinden, 133; declined to 
enter Bourbon plot against Na- 
poleon, 163; banished to the 
United States by Napoleon, 164; 
in the campaign of 1813, 372; 
his death, 375, 376. 

Mortier, Marshal, his antecedents, 
247, 248; at the fall of Paris 
in 1814, 393. 

Moscow, Russia, the burning of, 
342-344. 

Mt. Tabor, Palestine, Battle of, 
101-103. 

Muiron, Colonel, with Napoleon 
at Toulon, 33; died in defence 
of him at Arcole, 58 ; scene com- 
memorated on Arch of Triumph, 
254; Napoleon thought of tak- 
ing his name after Waterloo, 
453. 

Murat, Marshal, with Napoleon in 
the desert, 92 ; his marriage with 
Caroline Bonaparte, 157 ; at the 
Battle of Austerlitz, 200, 201; 
created Prince, 215; at Battle 
of Eylau, 235; his antecedents, 
247, 248; appointed King of 
Naples, 267; seized Rome, 279; 
at meeting of Napoleon and 
Marie Louise, 306; with Napo- 
leon in the invasion of Russia, 
331; on the Russian retreat, 
357; at the Battle of Dresden, 
374; betrayed Napoleon, 384; 
his death, 452, 453. 

Naples, Kingdom of, brought to 
terms by Napoleon, 53 ; bestowed 
upon Joseph Bonaparte by Na- 
poleon, 213; its crown trans- 
ferred to Murat, 267. 



Napoleon 

Birth and Youth 

Birth, 3, 4; Corsican revolu- 
tion, 4, 5; the subjugation of 
Corsica, 6; Napoleon's mother, 6; 
his foster mother, 6; his boyish 
temper, 7 ; his birthplace and 
Ajaccio described, 7—11; boy- 
hood battles, 11, 12; at school in 
Ajaccio, 14; at school in 
Brienne, 13-17; learning French, 
14; his hatred of France and 
his Corsican patriotism, 16; 
Brienne to-day, 17-19; at the 
Ecole Militaire, Paris, 19-21; 
Bourrienne, his schoolmate at 
Brienne, 17; Peccadeuc and 
Phelippeaux, his schoolmates at 
Ecole Militaire, 20; influenced 
by revolutionary philosophy, 
20; examined by La Place, and 
his low standing, 21. 

In the Army and the Revolu- 
tion 

Going to his regiment on bor- 
rowed money, 22; Valence, his 
first post, described, 22; as sub- 
lieutenant, living on $20 a 
month, 22, 23 ; his first sweet- 
heart, Mile. Colombier, 23 ; his 
reading and studies, and liter- 
ary efforts, 23-25; his devotion 
to the doctrines of Rousseau, 24 ; 
meditated suicide, 24 ; on duty 
at Auxonne, and his privations 
there, 25; advocating the revo- 
lution in Corsica, 25; promoted 
to first lieutenancy, 26; secre- 
tary of a revolutionary club, 26 ; 
lieutenant colonel, Corsican na- 
tional guard, 26; beginning of 
a life long quarrel with Pozzo 
di Borgo, 26 ; dismissed from the 
French army, 26: at Paris in 



516 



INDEX 



the Revolution, 27; restored to 
the army and appointed captain, 
28; his first active service, 28; 
his breach with Paoli, 28; a 
Frenchman at last, 29; ban- 
ished from Corsica, 29, 30; Cor- 
sican loyalty to his memory, 30. 

The Man on Horseback 

A penniless refugee in France, 
31; at the siege of Toulon, 32- 
34; brigadier general, 34; im- 
prisoned and released, 35 ; or- 
dered to Turkey and dropped 
from the army the same day, 
35; the revolution of the 13th 
Vendemiaire, 35-37 ; his meet- 
ing with Josephine, 42; general- 
in-chief of the Army of the In- 
terior, 43; his marriage, 44, 45; 
general-in-chief of the Army of 
Italy, 4G ; his plan of campaign, 
47; with the army, 47; his first 
victory, 48; his first treaty of 
peace, 49 ; a love-sick bride- 
groom, 49; by the bridge of 
Lodi, 50, 51 ; acclaimed "Little 
Corporal," 51; in the cockpit of 
Europe, 52; his treaties with 
the Pope and the King of Na- 
ples, 53; rejoined by Josephine, 
54; battles of Castiglione and 
Lonato, 55; his narrow escapes 
from capture, 55; defeated the 
Austrians in the Tyrol, 56; re- 
treated from the Austrians at 
Caldiero, 56; Battle of Arcole, 
57-59; Battle of Rivoli, 60, 61; 
capture of Mantua, 62; invasion 
of Austria, 62-64 ; armistice at 
Leoben, 64; his first court at 
Milan and Montebello, 65-69; 
handsomely remembered his 
mother in the first hour of vie 
tory, 68; his dislike of the name 
Napoleon, 69; appointed Bour- 



rienne his secretary, 69; tear- 
ing down thrones and setting up 
republics, 70, 71; the loot of 
Italy, 71; the Peace of Campo 
Formio, 72. 

In the Orient 

His expedition to Egypt, 73, 
74; the voyage, and the capture 
of Malta, 75, 76; eluded Nelson, 
76; landed in Egypt, 77, 78; at 
Alexandria, 78, 79; the march 
to Cairo, 79-81; the Battle of 
the Pyramids, 82-85; his fleet 
lost in the Battle of the Nile, 
Sti; his rule in Egypt, 87-90; 
his project for a Suez Canal, 88; 
Sultan of Turkey declared war 
against him, 89; across the 
desert, 91-94; capture of Jaffa 
and massacre of prisoners, 94- 
96; advance into Syria, 97-99; 
Siege of Acre, 97-106; Battle of 
Mt. Tabor, 101-103; in Naz- 
areth, 103; his retreat from 
Acre, 107 ; in the plague hos- 
pital at Jaffa, 107; the poison- 
ing story, 108; his return to 
Cairo, 108; Battle of Aboukir, 
108, 109; his flight from Egypt, 
109; landed in France, 110; tri- 
umphal progress to Paris, 110, 
111. 

The Consulate 

The situation in France on 
Napoleon's return from Egypt, 
111; the plot for the overthrow 
of the Directory, 111, 112; Na- 
poleon mobbed, 113; cleared the 
legislative hall with grenadiers, 
113; a provisional consulate, 
113; the scene at St. Cloud, 113; 
reorganising the government, 
114, 115; mourning for Wash- 
ington, 116; stealing into the 



INDEX 



517 



Tuileries, 116, 117; a legacy of 
war, 119; fooling Europe, 120; 
crossing the Alps, 118-126; 
planning the Battle of Marengo, 
127; a defeat turned to victory, 
128-131; Austria brought to 
terms, 133; England made 
peace, 133, 134; habits and char- 
acteristics of the First Consul, 
135-138; reuniting the country, 
138; restoring religion and mak- 
ing the Concordat with Rome, 
138-140; formulating the Code 
Napoleon, 140; elected Consul 
for Life, 141; elected President 
of Cisalpine Republic, 142; La- 
fayette's protest, 142; sale of 
Louisiana, 143-146 ; remember- 
ing old friends, 147-149; the 
consular court at the Tuileries 
and at Malmaison, 149-155; 
the man described, 154, 155; "1 
am not like other men," 157 ; 
his advance to the throne, 159- 
166; Bourbon bribes, and plots 
against him, 160-166; an at- 
tempt to assassinate him, 161; 
betrayed by Bourrienne, 162, 
163; more Bourbon plots and 
death of Duke d'Enghien, 163- 
166; death of the Republic, 
166. 

Emperor 

Proclaimed Emperor, 168; 
"Putting gold braid on repub- 
licans," 169; choosing Charle- 
magne as imperial ancestor, 
170; preparing for coronation, 
170, 171; religious marriage 
with Josephine, 172, 173; the 
coronation, 173-176; crowned 
King of Italy, 176; remodelled 
Switzerland into modern repub- 
lic, 179; stormy scene with Brit- 
ish ambassador, 179, 180; plan 



of invading England, 180-183; 
received offer of steamboat and 
submarine from Fulton, 180; 
long struggle to conquer Eng- 
land on the land, 184; cause of 
the Napoleonic wars, 185; cam- 
paign of Ulm, 186-191; the 
Grand Army described, 187-190; 
entry into Vienna, 191, 192; how 
Napoleon chose the field of Aus- 
terlitz, 193-195; his plan of 
battle, 196; the night before, 
197, 198; the Sun of Austerlitz, 
198; the victory, 199-202; meet- 
ing with Francis of Austria, 
203; received Venice from Aus- 
tria, 204; imperial matchmak- 
ing and separation of Jerome 
and Betsy Pater son, 206-212; 
king making, 213-217; founded 
Confederation of the Rhine, 
219; conquest of Prussia in 
1806-1807, 220-237; Battle of 
Jena, 221-224; at Sans Souci 
and the tomb of Frederick the 
Great, 224, 225; freed Polish 
serfs, 230; Battle of Eylau, 233- 
235; Battle of Friedland, 236, 
237; the Peace of Tilsit, 238- 
245; his marshals, 247-251; how 
he rewarded them, 249, 250; 
marshals contrasted, 251; his 
ambition and plans for Paris, 
252-253; laying out streets and 
setting up monuments, 253-256; 
dealing with poor and unem- 
ployed, 256; constructing canals 
and highways for the Empire, 
257-259 ; emancipating the Jews, 
259; neglecting popular educa- 
tion, 259; attitude toward art 
and the opera, 259, 260; his im- 
mense correspondence, 260; his 
handwriting, 260; dismissed 
Talleyrand, 261; abolished the 
Tribunate, 261 ; his finances, 



518 



INDEX 



261; his economies, 262; his re- 
wards for all kinds of merits, 
262 ; his consuming energies, 
263; his despotism, 263. 

The Empire Waning 

Napoleon's first downward 
steps, 264; his decrees against 
American ships, 265; his over- 
throw of Portuguese throne, 
265, 266; his seizure of Rome, 
266; appointed Joseph Bona- 
parte King of Spain, 266, 267 ; 
Murat, King of Naples, 267; his 
delusion, 267 ; challenged by 
revolution in Spain, 267-270; 
his reunion with the Czar at 
Erfurt, 269; entered Madrid, 
270; pursued Sir John Moore, 
270, 271 ; returned to Paris, 271 ; 
caught between two foes, 272; 
his Wagram campaign, 272- 
279; wounded at Ratisbon, 272; 
his soliloquy before the Castle 
of Dernstein, 273, 274; his cap- 
ture of Vienna, 274; arrested 
and deported Pope Pius VII, 
279, 280; his peace treaty with 
Austria, 280, 281; his court, his 
opinions about women and his 
relations with them, 282-291; 
son born to him by Eleonore 
Revel, 290; son born to him by 
Mme. Walewska, 290; his reso- 
lution to seek an heir; his trou- 
bles with Josephine's creditors, 
293; her usefulness to him, 293- 
295; announced divorce plan to 
her, 295, 296; his settlement on 
her, 296, 297; the divorce and 
parting, 297, 298; selecting 
Marie Louise for second wife, 
299, 300; the marriage, 304- 
309; at the birth and christen- 
ing of the King of Rome, 310- 
313. 



The Russian Disaster 

Evil influence of divorce and 
second marriage, 315; his dress 
and manners, 315, 316; his au- 
tocracy, 316, 317; his work fin- 
ished, 318, 319; his women ene- 
mies, 320; his seizure of Olden- 
burg, 320; his estrangement 
from the Czar, 320, 321; baffled 
by American ships, 321; evil ef- 
fects of his continental system, 
321, 322; his attitude toward 
the church, 322, 323; his an- 
nexation of Holland, 323; his 
embarrassment over the selec- 
tion of Bernadotte to be crown 
prince of Sweden, 323, 324; his 
annexation of Swedish Pomme- 
rania, 324; his successful rule 
in his Empire, 324, 325; his 
moral deterioration, 325-327 ; 
his fatalism, 326, 327; again 
caught between two foes, 328 ; 
his departure for the Russian 
campaign, 329 ; his congress of 
sovereigns at Dresden, 329; his 
army of invasion, 330; crossing 
the frontier, 330-332; no longer 
the man of Austerlitz, 333; 
greeted by disasters at the out- 
set, 333-335; before Smolensk, 
335, 336; plunging deeper into 
the wilds, 336; at the Battle of 
Borodino, 337, 338; before Mos- 
cow, 339-341; the burning of 
the city, 342-344; souvenirs of 
his stay at the Kremlin, 344- 
349 ; his retreat from Moscow, 
350-360; "It is but a step from 
the sublime to the ridiculous," 
359. 

Overthrow and Abdication 

"All Cossack or all republi- 
can," 361 ; his futile struggle 
with the Pope, 363, 364; raising 



INDEX 



519 



a new army in 1813, 364, 365; 
his Saxon campaign, 366; at the 
Battle of Liitzen, 366; at the 
Battle of Bautzen, 367; his 
grief at the death of Duroc, 
368; the fatal truce, 368; his 
interview with Metternich at 
Dresden, 369, 370; England his 
most constant foe, 370, 371; end 
of the truce, 371; at the Battle 
of Dresden, 373-375; overthrown 
at the Battle of Leipsic, 376- 
381; his unavailing efforts to 
raise another army in 1814, 382- 
385; liberated the Pope and 
Ferdinand of Spain, 384; his 
last hours with his son, 385, 
386; at the Battle of Brienne, 
386; at Battle of La Rothiere, 
387; at the Battles of Champ- 
paubert, Montmirail, Chateau 
Thierry and Montereau, 389; 
repulsed by Bliicher, 390 ; nearly 
overwhelmed by Schwarzenburg 
at Arcis sur Aube, 390; his last 
card, 390, 391 ; his command to 
save the King of Rome from 
capture, 392; racing to the de- 
fence of Paris, 393; at Cour de 
France, 393-395; at Fontaine- 
bleau, 396; abandoned by mar- 
shals and servitors, 397, 398; 
his abdication, 397, 398; at- 
tempted suicide, 398, 399; his 
farewell to the Guard, 399; his 
journey to Elba, 399-400; his 
exile and reign at Elba, and 
Elba to-day, 402-412. 

The Hundred Days 

The Allies violate Treaty of 
Fontainebleau, 413, 414; his 
flight from Elba, 414-416; his 
landing in France, 416-418; his 
march through the Maritime 
Alps, 418-420; joined by "Jean 



Valjean" at Digne, 420; "Who 
will shoot his General?" 421, 
422; his entry into Grenoble, 
422, 423; into Lyons, 423; de- 
nounced as an outlaw, 423; won 
Marshal Ney, 423; again in the 
Tuileries, 424; the lightning 
change among the courtiers, 
425, 426; his army, 427; fooling 
Bliicher and Wellington, 427, 
428; going to the front, 428, 
429; his fatal hesitancy, 429- 
431; at the Battle of Ligny, 
430; his first sight of a British 
soldier in twenty years, 431, 
432; at the Battle of Waterloo, 
432-446 ; his flight from the dis- 
aster, 446, 447. 

In Captivity 

His final dethronement, 448- 
449; his retirement to Malmai- 
son, 449-451; debating his fu- 
ture, 450, 451 ; preferred to sur- 
render to England, 451; his re- 
jection of plans for his escape, 
451, 452; his last step on French 
soil, 452; his reasons for pre- 
ferring to throw himself upon 
England, 453; his appeal to 
George IV, 453; his surrender 
to Captain Maitland of the 
Bellerophon, 455; his arrival in 
Torbay, 455; in Plymouth har- 
bour, 455; received sentence of 
banishment to St. Helena, 456; 
his companions, 456; his trans- 
fer to the Northumberland, 456; 
his last glimpse of France, 457; 
his life on the Northumberland, 
457; his first view of St. He- 
lena, 457; the islands in the 
voyage of his life, 458; St. He- 
lena described, 458, 459; his life 
at "The Briars," 460 ; Longwood 
described, 460, 461 ; his strange 



520 



INDEX 



court, 461, 462; his struggles 
with the English language, 462, 
463; his good relations with the 
English at first, 463; his feud 
with Sir Hudson Lowe, 464-470 ; 
the efforts to prevent his escape, 
465, 466; his defiance of the 
governments of Europe, 466, 
467 ; his gardening, 467 ; his dis- 
ease mistakenly diagnosed, 470; 
his last hours and death, 470, 
471; cancer disclosed by the au- 
topsy, 471; his burial in an un- 
marked grave, 471, 472; his 
body conveyed to France and en- 
tombed in the Invalides, 485- 
487 ; his tomb described, 487- 
489; souvenirs of him at the 
Invalides, 487; his life reviewed, 
490-493. 

Napoleon II, see Rome, King of. 

Napoleon III, at the Battle of 
Solferino, 56; imprisoned in 
Jerome Bonaparte's country pal- 
ace, 214; restored statue of Na- 
poleon to Vendome column, 254; 
his memorial to his mother, 401. 

Narbonne, Mme. de, her disdain of 
Napoleon, 285. 

Nazareth, Palestine, visited by 
Napoleon, 103. 

Neipperg, Count, aided to alienate 
Marie Louise from Napoleon, 
409 ; became her morganatic hus- 
band, 477; his death, 483. 

Nelson, Horatio, lost an eye at 
Calvi, 30; eluded by Napoleon 
on the Mediterranean, 76, 77; 
destroyed Napoleon's fleet in the 
Battle of the Nile, 86; lured 
away from Toulon, 182; his vic- 
torious death at Trafalgar, 191. 

Ney, Marshal, at Ulm, 190; at 
Battle of Friedland, 237; his 
antecedents, 247, 248; on the 
Russian retreat, 354-358; mis- 



understood orders at Bautzen, 
367; at the first abdication, 
397; ordered to capture Napo- 
leon on return from Elba, but 
surrendered, 423; at Quatre 
Bras, 428-431; at Waterloo, 
442, 444^45; his death, 452. 

Nicholas I of Russia, married 
daughter of Queen Louise, 246; 
his sarcasm on the tomb of Na- 
poleon, 488. 

Nile, The, Battle of, 86. 

Norway, annexed to Sweden, 384. 

Oldenburg, Duchess of, her bitter 
grievance against Napoleon, 320. 

O'Meara, Dr. Barry, Napoleon's 
physician at St. Helena, 461, 
462; removed from Longwood, 
468. 

Oudinot, Marshal, his antecedents, 
247, 248; at the first abdication, 
397 ; his tomb in the Invalides 
at Paris, 487. 

Palestine, Napoleon's campaign in, 
93-96. 

Paoli, Pasquale, Corsican general- 
in-chief, 5; exiled to England, 
6; his breach with Napoleon, 
28. 

Peccadeuc, Picot de, Napoleon's 
schoolmate at the Ecole Mili- 
taire, 20; fighting Napoleon in 
1813, 372. 

Perignon, Marshal, his antecedents, 
247, 248. 

Phelippeaux, Napoleon's school' 
mate at Ecole Militaire, 20; op- 
posed Napoleon at Acre, 99; his 
death, 103. 

Pichegru, General, in the school at 
Brienne, 19; in a Bourbon plot 
against Napoleon, 163; com- 
mitted suicide, 164. 



INDEX 



521 



Pius VI, Pope, his truce with Na- 
poleon, 53. 

Pius VII, Pope, makes Concordat 
with Napoleon, 138-140; com- 
ing to coronation, 172; insisted 
on religious marriage between 
Napoleon and Josephine, 172, 
173; at the coronation, 173-176; 
declined to annul Bonaparte- 
Paterson marriage, 209 ; his car- 
dinals deported by Napoleon, 
266; he is arrested and deported 
by Napoleon, 279, 280; political 
effect of his refusal to annul 
Bonaparte-Paterson marriage, 
322; his retaliation on Napo- 
leon, 322, 323; at Fontaine- 
bleau, 363, 364; liberated, 384; 
appealed to powers in behalf of 
Napoleon at St. Helena, 469. 

Poland, war in, 1807, 229; her 
serfs freed by Napoleon, 230; a 
little strip of, gained by Russia 
at Tilsit, 245 ; grand duchy of 
Warsaw formed by Napoleon 
and bestowed on the King of 
Saxony, 245 ; a part of Austria's 
Polish province transferred to 
Grand Duchy of Warsaw, 280. 

Poniatowski, Marshal, his ante- 
cedents, 247, 248 ; with Napo- 
leon on eve of Russian cam- 
paign, 330; drowned at Leipsic, 
381. 

Portugal, Napoleon and Czar de- 
termined to close her ports 
against England, 244; her royal 
family banished by Napoleon, 
265, 266; but are rescued by 
Sidney Smith, 266. 

Potocka, Countess, on Marie 
Louise's appearance, 304. 

Pozzo di Borgo, Carlo Andrea, the 
beginning of his life long quar- 
rel with Napoleon, 26; his 
twenty years' war upon him, 



327; in the campaign of 1813, 
372; proposed his removal from 
Elba to St. Helena, 414; at 
Waterloo, 434; wounded, 446; 
his last thrust at Napoleon, 
466; demanded that the King of 
Rome be forbidden to marry, 
475; accused of plotting mur- 
der of King of Rome, 478. 

Prussia, disappointed her allies in 
1805, 185; indifferent to Ger- 
man patriotism, and trafficking 
with Napoleon, 218, 219; her an- 
nexation of Hanover, and war 
with England, 219; conquered 
by Napoleon, 220-237; dis- 
trusted by him, 243, 244; her 
dismemberment at Tilsit, 244, 
245. 

Pyramids, Battle of the, 82-85. 

Quatre Bras, Belgium, Battle of, 
430. 

Rapp, General, at the Battle of 
Austerlitz, 201 ; his blunt retort 
to Napoleon, 317. 

Remusat, Mme. de, her character- 
isation of the First Consul, 152. 

Renaudine, Mme., aunt of Jose- 
phine, who arranged her mar- 
riage to Beauharnais, 39; ap- 
proved her marriage to Napo- 
leon, 44. 

Revel, Eleonore, presented a son 
to Napoleon, 290. 

Rhine, Confederation of the, 
formed by Napoleon, 219; its 
abandonment of Napoleon, 370. 

Richmond, Duchess of, her ball on 
the eve of Waterloo, 429. 

Rivoli, Italy, Battle of, 60, 61. 

Robespierre, Maximilien, at the 
height of power, 31. 

Rochefaucauld, Mme. de la, at 
Josephine's coronation, 175. 



522 



INDEX 



Rome, King of, his birth, christen- 
ing and childhood, 310-314; his 
last hours with his father, 385, 
386; his flight from Paris, 392; 
carried off to Austria, 400; sepa- 
rated from his mother, 409 : 
dreaded by the monarchs after 
Napoleon's fall, 473; a prisoner 
in his grandfather's palace, 474; 
his name changed, 474, 475; cut 
off from succession to his moth- 
er's duchy, 475; plots and coun- 
ter plots, 475; his inquiries 
about his father, 476; the news 
of his father's death, 476, 477; 
the efforts to seat him on his 
father's throne, 478, 479; his 
tributes to his father's memory, 
479, 480; entered Austrian 
army, 480; his death, 480, 481; 
his tomb, 484. 

Roustan, Napoleon's mameluke 
body servant, with him in Spain, 
269 ; on the Russian retreat, 
357 ; abandoned his fallen mas- 
ter in 1814, 398. 

Russia, in the third coalition, 185 ; 
demanded England recognise 
equality of flags at sea, 244 ; 
received a little strip of Poland 
from Napoleon, and permission 
to take Finland from Sweden, 
245 ; pushing her boundary west- 
ward, 331, 332; her monument 
of Napoleon's campaign, 332; 
her memorials, at Moscow, of 
Napoleon's repulse, 344-349 ; her 
losses in the Napoleonic cam- 
paign, 359; permitted violation 
of treaty pledges to Napoleon at 
his abdication, 413, 414; her 
commissioner to St. Helena re- 
buffed by Napoleon, 466. 

Sardinia, Kingdom of, made peace 
with Napoleon, 50. 



Savary, General, reporting to Na- 
poleon at Marengo, 129; watch- 
ing Bourbon plotters, 163, 164; 
returning from Spain with Na- 
poleon, 271; his despairing let- 
ter to him in 1814, 391; parting 
from him on the Bellerophon, 
456. 

Saxony, raised to a kingdom by 
Napoleon, 213; received grand 
duchy of Warsaw from him, 245. 

Saxony, King of, host of Napo- 
leon on the eve of Russian cam- 
paign, 329; at the Battle of 
Dresden, 375. 

Scliwar/.enberg, Prince, in the cam- 
paign of 1814, 385; deceived by 
a Napoleonic ruse, 388; stag- 
gered by Napoleon at Monte- 
reau, 389; nearly overwhelmed 
Napoleon at Arcis Sur Aube, 
390. 

Smith, Sidney, commander of Eng- 
lish fleet at Acre, 98; taunting 
Napoleon, 105; sent European 
newspapers to Napoleon, 109; 
rescued royal family of Portu- 
gal, 266. 

Soult, Mme., rebuked by Napoleon, 
283. 

Soult, Marshal, at Ulm, 190; at 
the Battle of Austerlitz, 199- 
201; his antecedents, 247, 248; 
at Waterloo, 435. 

Spain, her secret transfer of 
Louisiana to Napoleon, 143; her 
royal family dethroned by Na- 
poleon, 266; her crown trans- 
ferred to Joseph Bonaparte, 266, 
267; her revolution, 267-270. 

Stael, Mme. de, her dialogue with 
the First Consul, 153. 

St. Cyr, Marshal, his antecedents, 
247, 248. 

St. Denis, Napoleon's valet, by the 
deathbed at St. Helena, 471; re- 



INDEX 



523 



turned to St. Helena to escort 
Napoleon's body to France, 485, 
486. 

St. Helena, proposed by Pozzo di 
Borgo as place of exile for Na- 
poleon, 414; chosen by the Brit- 
ish ministry, 455, 450; de- 
scribed, 458, 459. 

Stokoe, Dr., removed from Napo- 
leon's household at Longwood, 
468. 

Sturmer, Baron, Austrian commis- 
sioner at St. Helena, 466. 

Suchet, Marshal, his antecedents, 
247, 248. 

Suez Canal, Napoleon's project for 
its construction vetoed by engi- 
neers, 88. 

Sweden, Napoleon and Czar deter- 
mined to close her ports against 
England, 244; Napoleon con- 
sented to Russia taking Finland 
from her, 245 ; Napoleon an- 
nexed Swedish Pommerania, 
324; Bernadotte chosen heir to 
her throne, 323, 324; annexed 
Norway, 384. 

Switzerland, her confederation re- 
modelled by Napoleon, 179. 

Taine, Henri, on Napoleon, 260. 

Talleyrand, Charles Maurice, dis- 
missed by Napoleon, 261 ; his re- 
tort to him, 288 ; his gross in- 
sult, 317; leader in the Bourbon 
restoration, 395 ; wished to re- 
move Napoleon from Elba, 414. 

Tilsit, East Prussia, Peace of, 
238-245. 

Tolstoi, Count Leo, on Napoleon 
in Moscow, 344 ; on the retreat 
of the French, 351. 

Toulon, France, Siege of, 32-34. 

Trafalgar, Spain, Battle of, 191. 

Turkey, Napoleon chosen to in- 
struct her army, 35; nominal 



ruler of Egypt, 80; declared war 
on France, 89; her partition dis- 
cussed by Napoleon and Alex- 
ander at Tilsit, 240, 241. 

Ulm, Wlirtemberg, Campaign of, 
184-192. 

United States, its treaty with Na- 
poleon in 1800, 143; purchase of 
Louisiana, 143-146; its flag the 
refuge of commerce in Napole- 
onic wars, 264; injuries to its 
shipping, 265; Embargo Act, 
265; its ships admitted to Rus- 
sian ports in defiance of Napo- 
leon, 321. 

Uxbridge, Lord, retreating before 
Napoleon, 431, 432. 

Valjean, Jean, the original of the 
character followed Napoleon to 
Waterloo, 420. 

Vandamme, General, at the Battle 
of Austerlitz, 201, 202. 

Venice, invaded by Napoleon, 53; 
the republic destroyed by Napo- 
leon, 70; ceded to Austria by 
Napoleon, 72; ceded to Napoleon 
by Austria, 204. 

Victor, Marshal, at Battle of 
Friedland, 237 ; in the campaign 
of 1814, 385. 

Victor Emmanuel II, at the Battle 
of Solferino, 56. 

Victoria of England, presented to 
France the funeral car of Napo- 
leon at St. Helena, 487. 

Vignali, Father, one of Napoleon's 
priests at St. Helena, 469; pray- 
ing by the deathbed, 471. 

Wagram, Austria, Battle of, 278, 

279. 
Walewska, Mme., presented a son 

to Napoleon, 290. 



524 



INDEX 



Walewski, Count, son of Napoleon, 
290. 

Washington, George, mourning for 
his death ordered by Napoleon, 
116; his biography read by him 
on the Bellerophon, 454. 

Waterloo, Belgium, Battle of, 432- 
446; its effect, 448, 449. 

Wellington, Duke of, at military 
school in France, 20; his cam- 
paign in Portugal, 268 ; fooled 
by Napoleon in the Hundred 
Days, 428; his army, 429; at 
the Duchess of Richmond's ball, 
429; at the Battle of Quatre 
Bras, 430; at the Battle of 
Waterloo, 432-446; counselled 
moderation to Bliicher, 450. 



Whitworth, Lord, in a stormy 
scene with Napoleon, 180. 

William I, German Emperor and 
son of Louise, 229; at the tomb 
of his mother, 246. 

William II, German Emperor, at 
Tilsit, 239 ; dedicated monument 
on the battlefield of Leipsic, 
377. 

Wurmser, Marshal, in command of 
an Austrian army against Na- 
poleon, 54; defeated by Napo- 
leon at Castiglione, 56: defeated 
in the Tyrol and retired in- 
to Mantua, 56; his surrender, 
62. 

Wiirtemberg, raised to a kingdom 
by Napoleon, 213. 



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